Harrington Starr can report a 54% increase in the flow of sales jobs in the Fintech space in 2018 compared to the same period in 2017 (1st January to 26th February). These roles are spread across sales, account management, relationship management, presales and marketing in general and are coming from start-ups and established players alike.

So, what has driven this uptick in hiring?

From speaking to our clients, it seems that the shock factor and doom-mongering around Brexit is increasingly less of a concern for them. With many of their clients, namely banks and exchanges, backtracking or revising down their estimations of the number of jobs leaving London, there is a growing sentiment that the forecasted storm isn’t going to be as violent as originally predicted.

What is also apparent is that there is a change in the direction of some of this hiring.

MifID II has dominated the focus for more than six months but now that the go-live date has passed, other areas that struggled previously are now picking up. There was a period where, if you weren’t selling something that solved a MiFID II challenge, you would be met with the objection that ‘budgets are focused on compliance needs and we can’t consider buying your product right now’. 

Our non-compliance vendor clients are reporting that the mood has changed and financial firms and now more open to the discussion about buying analytics, trading, risk and data products, for example, than they have been since before mid-2017.

This opening up of the market has seen these vendors pushing ahead with hiring where before there was a ‘wait and see’ attitude to what would happen after the MiFID II go-live.

Of course, its early days for 2018 but if fintech sales hiring maintains anything like this sort of momentum, then it’s sure to be a fantastic year for sales people.