Fintech firms pay top executives top dollar

Interesting article on Finextra about the pay packages of top fintech executives.

According to research from Morlands Human Capital, cited by Finextra, the average package of a CEO at a fintech with revenues over $5m (£3.8m), including bonuses, is £650,000 a year.  The research covered 500 fintechs in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

Chief Technology Officers also fared well with average pay, including bonuses, over half a million dollars.

The fact that the survey also found that chief financial officers at fintechs earned much less demonstrates the importance of tech and the ability to need to make sales quickly.

The high pay also reflects the fact that fintechs are competing with the big traditional financial services suppliers, which are notoriously generous to their business and tech leaders. For example after Paul Pester stepped down as CEO of TSB in the wake of the bank’s recent IT disaster he walked away with £1.7m, made up of £1.2m severance pay and a bonus of around £480,000 dating back before the bank was acquired by Sabadell in 2015.

According to Moorlands Human Capital’s owner, Paul Battye, winning ustomers is valued highly by fintech’s given the level of compensation paid to sales and marketing directors.

“It will be fascinating as the years go by to see if this phenomenon continues or if we see a harmonisation of compensation across the C-suite. In future years, we aim to be able to highlight the major trends in fintech salaries.”

It is a demonstration of the rapid ascent of fintech when you think that companies that didn’t even exist a few years ago are attracting the brightest and the best with huge pay packages.