After starting off as a UBS graduate and Goldman Sachs developer, Lewis Tuff was one of the first employees at fintech start-up Revolut. During his time there, Lewis pioneered the cryptocurrency feature in the online banking app and helped scale the team to 50+ members. Lewis now runs engineering at Blockchain.com, a highly successful cryptocurrency wallet with a customer base of 80m+ and counting and one of the largest fintech companies in Europe. Work in Fintech recently caught up with Lewis to find out his thoughts on where cryptocurrency and blockchain is headed in the future, as well as graduate/career advice.
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“It's a hot topic, it's in the media, a lot of people are talking about it. I think that's great to kind of attract more talented individuals, from all backgrounds to kind of look at what are the opportunities in the space, and the space is growing exponentially, month on month, let alone year on year.”
After having spoken to Lewis about his experiences at UBS, Goldman Sachs, and Revolut, Lewis explained the best way for students and new graduates to get involved in crypto and blockchain. The rise of social media platforms such as Reddit, Slack, Discord, and Clubhouse offer a lot more opportunities and way for young people to get their careers started than there used to be even 10 years ago. Since most crypto and blockchain projects and open-source, you can look up the repos on GitHub, check out the inner workings of them, and even fix some of the small bugs that have been raised by the community. Blockchain.com have hired engineers this way he mentioned.
First published in October 2021
Just over a year ago, I started the Work in Fintech mentoring project. Why? I wanted to give back and provide the opportunity and network to young people that I didn’t have when I started out my career.