The global financial sector is expected to be worth US$26.5 trillion in 2022 and the fintech market share across 48 fintech unicorns is now worth over US$187 billion. And this means that for us, software engineers, working at a fintech can be very lucrative. The incomes are higher, there are unmatched perks and benefits like regular discounts, premium credit/debit cards for free, pension plans, private health insurance, etc.

If you look at the above image, it shows how many fintech companies are operating in different parts of the world. The digital revolution profoundly affects businesses in all sectors, in addition to our daily lives. Working for a fintech enables you to remain at the forefront of this revolution, and opens up opportunities to be more than a software engineer.

Why should you care about Fintech as an Engineer?

Due to the immense opportunities that are currently available, fintech becomes one of the best options for engineers. The companies operating in this domain have a lot of users, most of them are using the latest and greatest tech stacks to cope up with the high demand. Take a look at the tech stack of Revolut.

As an engineer, you can quickly grow in an environment like this. With the new way of working, as most of the companies follow agile development, have cross-functional teams, a high degree of autonomy, open culture, people from all around the world, you get to sit on the driver’s seat and make way for your career.

Not only you will get to learn engineering skills, but you will also have immense opportunities to learn about business, domain, compliance, and a direct impact on the end-user. Along with that, you have high-paying roles, stock options, good teams, and highly talented people.

Let’s take a deeper look.

Technology

High usage of distributed systems will help you learn so much about scale and the problems that come with an international market. Microservices architecture, event-driven systems, auto-scaling of services, distributed caching, database sharding, and many more topics that you would get exposure to. The tech blogs for these companies can give you some understanding of the kind of problems and solutions implemented. This is one of the articles from TransferWise. Achieving high availability with stateful Kafka Streams applications Kafka Streams is a java library used for analyzing and processing data stored in Apache Kafka. As with any other stream…tech.transferwise.com

Apart from that it also has good use cases for AI and Machine Learning. For example:

1. Fraud prevention — ML tools analyze existing fraudulent cases, detect common, patterns, and evaluate whether a particular business doesn’t display similar behavior. This allows the prediction of possible frauds and uncovers questionable financial institutions.

2. Risk management — the software analyzes the company’s performance and detects potentially threatening patterns.

3. Fund development prediction — by scanning investment records, an ML-powered tool can define the most probable future developments.

4. Customer service — the platform analyzes customer data and builds a smart client profile.

Klarna, one of the biggest unicorns in Europe utilized AI and ML to personalize the checkout experience for the customers. How Klarna personalized the checkout experience with data and ML Klarna Bank is not just a regular bank. They make the experience of online payment to the next century, for both…read.hyperight.com

Domain Knowledge

The domain has long-term potential and it will be relevant for the coming 10 years if not more. As an engineer, understanding the domain and not just the technical aspects will be a key to further growth. The fundamentals of money and how it works will largely remain the same. Technology will only change how we interact with money.

Some of the most active areas of fintech innovation include or revolve around the following areas:

• Cryptocurrency and digital currency. Coinbase, Uphold, Voyager, are a few examples in this domain.

• Regtech, which seeks to help financial service firms meet industry compliance rules, especially those covering Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer protocols that fight fraud.

• Stock-trading apps allow investors to buy and sell stocks easily with the help of their mobile devices. Robinhood, eToro, Revolut are some of the examples operating in this domain.

• Mobile payments services that allow customers to exchange money and payments online or on mobile devices (including popular payment app Venmo).

• Unbanked/underbanked, services that seek to serve disadvantaged or low-income individuals who are ignored or underserved by traditional banks or mainstream financial services companies.

• Cybersecurity, given the proliferation of cybercrime and the decentralized storage of data, cybersecurity and fintech are intertwined.

Market Exposure

In any job in any field, there comes a time when a person gets sick of repeating the same set of tasks every day. There is an end to a 9 to 5 job that offers zero exposure and forces the employee to have the expertise of only one field. This is not how Fintech works.

An employee in a Fintech firm is exposed to a pool of domains and he is made to choose one amongst many. Initially, you start from a basic level but with the passage of time, you start growing and once you’ve grown to be an expert, you have the choice of becoming a consultant and help other companies in reaching their goals or switch to another domain which offers you even higher paychecks and improves your learning curve as well.

Fintech companies are international or aim to become so quickly. Being in a multilingual environment is a great way to improve your linguistic skills. An added bonus is that international travel could occur!

Final Thought

With the growth of technology and the ever-changing demands of financial markets, the changes are inevitable. Each year transforms fintech in a new way. And I believe that this is going to be one of the coolest places to work for engineers in the coming years.

Thanks for reading.

Resources:

The illustrations on this post are awesome and free at manypixels.

https://upplabs.com/blog/best-fintech-development-tech-stack/