It’s been turbulent times for fintech. Venture funding has dried up; crypto crashed; and fears of a potential recession have led many companies to tighten budgets and unleash layoffs.
But as crowdsourced data from levels.fyi shows, turbulent times haven’t curbed fintech’s tendency to pay out high compensation—even for entry-level software engineers. Here’s a full breakdown of some prominent fintech companies and what they pay:
Traditional finance firms have been undergoing their own reckoning lately, thanks to bank collapses and other issues; massive assets and stringent regulations aren’t necessarily a guarantee of stability. Nonetheless, many tech pros are intrigued by the idea of building software and services for a big bank or hedge fund. How does pay for software engineers within fintech compare to what their colleagues receive in more traditional finance firms? Levels.fyi gives us some insight into that, too:
At first glance, it seems like there’s a pretty wide gap between what fintech and traditional finance firms pay their entry-level software engineers. Keep in mind that crowdsourcing isn’t always the most scientific way of determining compensation data; relative sample size and other factors can wildly skew the final output.
To create some additional points of comparison, we turned to Glassdoor and its estimates of total pay for software engineers who work in traditional finance; keep in mind that this data encompasses engineers at all ranks, from entry-level to senior:
The Glassdoor data closes the gap a bit—but even so, it seems that fintech pays a bit more than traditional financial firms, especially when you consider how software engineers’ compensation at fintech firms will only increase with tenure (provided the firm survives, of course). The reason for higher fintech salaries is pretty clear: these cutting-edge firms must not only compete for talent with the traditional finance sector, but also deep-pocketed tech giants such as Google and Microsoft that have no compunctions about paying whatever it takes to secure the talent they need.
As the finance industry continues to embrace technologies such as blockchain, data science, machine learning, and chatbots, the need for tech specialists will only increase. If you’re skilled in a cutting-edge arena, chances are good you’ll have your pick of potential positions—whether you want the faster pace of a small fintech startup or the relative security of a century-old finance conglomerate.
