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.
Why You Should Work in Fintech
After talking to many leaders in fintech and web3 what I've learnt is:
- Every company is going to be a fintech company
- Fintech and web3 will grow exponentially eating up traditional financial services
3. Most people don't truly understand this opportunity... yet!
4. Generalists outperform specialists
5. 90% of people have not taken a straight path to success, they've pivoted or changed careers before they've found their true passion
6. Fintech is a sector which is abundant in opportunity and its something everyone - from students to young professionals and seasoned pro's - wants to learn more*(p.s. if you're interested in learning about fintech sign up to our newsletter to hear* about our exclusive events, coaching, mentoring and fintech cohorts!)
Work in Fintech - Born in the pandemic, thriving in 2021!
With lots of support and a great team we’ve achieved the following milestones in 2021:
- 3000 - and growing - regular listeners who have tuned into 30+ interviews with leaders in fintech
- Created a 6-week fintech work experience programme with visits to Revolut, Goldman Sachs, TP ICAP and even to Mansion House meeting the Lord Mayor of London
- A diverse founding team of every race, gender and socio-economic class
Why did I start this?
I was educated at state school and I was the first in my family to go to university. I wasn't fortunate enough to have a network of friends or family to help give me a leg up (both my parents were immigrants). So I've had to work hard to get where I am today.
One thing that I have been good at is networking and making efforts to keep in touch with people and to help others without expecting anything in return.
Over time this has helped me to create a large network of friends, partners, acquaintances and colleagues. All of whom have supported me over the last year with Work in Fintech.
However, what I really wanted to do - or give back - was share my network with students from my old school - students who have no network of their own. I wanted them to benefit from the hard work I've put in and give them the leg up that I never had.
During the pandemic I worked as a mentor with my old high school where, sadly, the pupils hadn’t been able to do work experience – something which ultimately helped me get my first job in the city. So I decided to created a work experience programme for them! More on that later.
Last summer, I was invited by Amplify Trading to speak about fintech to their summer analyst cohort. The chasm between what I see as fintech – an explosive, fast-paced sector with an abundance of opportunity – versus what the students and graduates knew about it (virtually zero) was immense. This was the genesis of Work in Fintech.
I firmly believe in having a bias for action (the 9th of Amazon’s leadership principles) which was the reason why I just went ahead and did this.
If an idea is burning away inside your mind, and doing it feels like the right thing to do, then don’t procrastinate - just do it!
What we’ve achieved at Work in Fintech – So far…
We’ve interviewed a broad set of leaders in fintech from Blockchain.com to Checkout.com, from Goldman to IBM, from the grandfather of Ethereum to a 12 year old NFT prodigy.
From these interviews we learned about:
- Why people are leaving financial institutions to work in fintech
- Advice for graduates looking at fintech as a career option
- Generalism vs specialism (what David Epstein calls ‘range’)
- How intellectual curiosity will take you far in any career, especially fintech
Here's Lewis Tuff, a former UBS and Goldman developer who moved to Revolut and now VP of Engineering at Blockchain.com.
Work Experience in Fintech
We created a virtual 6-week work experience programme including sessions with JP Morgan, Goldmans Sachs, UBS, Barclays, TP ICAP, Symphony, ipushpull, Amplify Trading, Gen-Z agency the Nerds Collective and futurist and author Theo Priestley.
The programme included a day in the City meeting the Lord Mayor of London at Mansion House, a tour of Goldman Sachs trading floor, a 1-to-1 session with a former RAF pilot and now head of FICC e-sales strategy at JPM and a tour of TP ICAPs broking floor.
We concluded the programme at the end of the summer with an insight day at Europe’s biggest fintech Revolut where we met trailblazers across the fintech team, from sales and marketing to coding and crypto trading.
We were incredibly fortunate to help break down the barriers of fintech and also to share the huge opportunity in fintech to students from high school, college and university students from a variety of backgrounds, race and class.
Building out a team
As we all know behind every success is a great team.
Our mission of inspiring and guiding students, graduates and professionals to a career in fintech has helped us to attract some amazing individuals as Founder Members, so a big thanks to Jagrag Singh, Amrit Khatkar, Helene Lipp, Joshua Lavorini, Ben Ford, Daniel Taiwo and our most recent member Benyamin Ahmed (check out his amazing story “12-year-old coder helped develop an NFT collection that made over $5 million in 3 weeks”).
We’ve spent many hours remotely working together over the past year and finally managed to meet (twice!) in September.
Creating opportunity and diversity in fintech
Fintech is a very young sector, so alongside huge opportunities to create wealth there are also opportunities to create equal and diverse companies who in turn strive to recruit from a wider and diverse pool of talent. Being from an immigrant family myself (Irish and Chinese) and the first in my family to go to university, this is important to me.
Beyond that, its crucial that we create an environment where individuals, companies and even countries can be stronger economically, culturally and morally using sectors like fintech as an enabler.
To coincide with the 1 year anniversary of Work in Fintech we pulled together some of the partners we’ve been working closely with over the last year and organisations such as UKBlackTech and the City of London Corporation. Here's a sneak peek of what we spoke about:
What started out as a side project has turned into something much more
It turns out that what we’re doing with Work in Fintech resonates with students, graduates and employers, as well as the leaders in fintech we’ve been lucky enough to meet. What began as a mentoring project has created its own force and momentum – so much in fact that its too much for me to do on my own (and with my ‘day job’ as CEO of ipushpull!).
Because of this I had come to the realisation that I needed a co-founder, some one with same passion as me, lots of experience and a great network.
Female fintech leader Ying Cao joins forces with Work in Fintech
Unbeknown to me – and with a touch of serendipity – it turned out that when we interviewed Ying Cao she had just left her role at Barclays Investment Bank as Head of Digital Products to launch a her own executive coaching platform called LIYT. After our podcast we got chatting and discovered that we both shared the same passions and quickly came to the conclusion that we should team up.
So, I am delighted to welcome aboard Ying Cao as Co-Founder of Work in Fintech!
Ying perfectly complements my entrepreneurial and start-up experience with her corporate successes.
Based in New York, Ying was responsible for developing Digital Strategy for Markets at Barclays. She also served on the Barclays Diversity networks driving diversity and inclusion, acting as a mentor and ambassador for Barclays Open Innovation Platform (Rise) and she sat on the board of Symphony and advisory board of Refinitiv. She is an entrepreneur herself, co-founding a Unicareer, an edtech firm, and more recently LIYT, am executive coaching platform.
She was also recognized by Markets Media in their 5th Annual Women in Finance Awards for Excellence in FinTech. Here's her picking up her award!
Work in Fintech in 2022 and beyond
With myself and Ying at the helm there's a lot we want to create. We want to double down on what we’ve done so far (interviews, school visits, work experience programmes) but we also want to:
- Build cohort based courses for:
- Young people looking to work in fintech
- Professionals working in financial institutions who want to move to fintech or crypto
- People working in fintech who want to move faster
- Fintech founders who want to build something extraordinary with the right talents in their team
2. Create blockchain based learning credentials
Come and join us!
If you can help us grow our team and community or you want to transform lives then we want to speak to you.
If you are someone who wants to constantly learn, who wants to explore new possibilities and opportunities, who wants to be with the best of the industry, who cares not only about their own success but helping others to advance, who wants to create something phenomenal, come and join us to be part of the change.
Follow us at LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok and subscribe to our waitlist to hear about exclusive events like insight days at Revolut, Goldman Sachs and TP ICAP as well as our coaching, mentoring and fintech courses.
We're currently looking for interns to join our growing global teams. Learn more here.