It’s quite easy, actually. The entire world of money - e-commerce, fintech, literally any aspect that deals with finances, even a shitty accounting software - requires a SHITTON of money to get going.
You have to deal with regulatory bullshit that takes up tons of resources and efforts and money. You have to deal with partnerships to make your product viable - also a big money sink. You have to pay for marketing, licensing, accreditation, the list goes on.
Good fintech engineers - let them be backend, frontend, security, etc. - are also super expensive. I make good money in my current Android engineer job, but I know people with lesser skills and experience whom are making 2-3x as much just because they fit into the whole fintech image (good looking, suit wearing, etc.), and have sold themselves to a company that had the funds for their “skills”. So yeah, a fintech company can spend 4-8x as much on just their personnel than a regular tech company…
Then of course you have the higher leadership and C-suite who also like to pad their pockets. I did a short stint at a fintech company, and came away appalled after the CFO, during a company outing, quite drunk, told me how he’s basically pocketing about half a million GBP as his “salary” every month, not to mention the income he manages from providing “certain services” to “certain elements”… heavily implied that these elements happen to be criminal in nature. Mind you this is the same guy who tried to haggle down my annual salary during the initial interview, even though I was more skilled than the role they wanted to fill… so yeah, fintech is either 1, super lucky (see e.g. Revolut), 2, super dirty or 3, dead in the water.
I interviewed for a fintech startup once and they were the most condescending assholes I’ve ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Anecdotal, but they really left an impression.
Regulatory bullshit? I’m quite happy with the fact that I can generally trust my bank not to fuck me over in a hundred different ways, thanks to all that ‘bullshit’
I’m not talking about the banking regulatory system.
Fintech - non-bank-certified money institutes - have a lot of duplicate regulatory requirements. Things like: certify PCI-DSS for payment processing, BUT ALSO certified for some kind of local framework which matches PCI-DSS 99% but has its own certification process and expenses etc., so it’s not as simple as just “doing what’s required”.
Again, there’s a ton of regulations that are beneficial for the institutes and their customers, but there is also a lot of them that are hindrances because they’re duplicate or obsolete processes, red tape, and so on, stuff that serves little to no actual purpose but are essentially leftover regulations that have been superceded but not officially eliminated.
Fair enough, there’s nuance here as with a lot of these things. I used to work in banking IT, I’ve seen some parts of it.
It was just the blanket “regulations = bad” sentiment I reacted to, though I see now that wasn’t the intent from your side
Yeah I guess I should’ve specified that when I said “bullshit regulations” I meant specifically the regulations that are truly bullshit, not that all regulations are bullshit. Freaking English and its many ways to interpret the same sentence because why could we have specificity, amirite?
Well, at least it gives us a common language… I’m not sure the discussion would go so well if I was speaking one of my other languages to you. Enjoy your evening, or morning, or whatever it’ll be on your end
It’s quite easy, actually. The entire world of money - e-commerce, fintech, literally any aspect that deals with finances, even a shitty accounting software - requires a SHITTON of money to get going.
You have to deal with regulatory bullshit that takes up tons of resources and efforts and money. You have to deal with partnerships to make your product viable - also a big money sink. You have to pay for marketing, licensing, accreditation, the list goes on.
Good fintech engineers - let them be backend, frontend, security, etc. - are also super expensive. I make good money in my current Android engineer job, but I know people with lesser skills and experience whom are making 2-3x as much just because they fit into the whole fintech image (good looking, suit wearing, etc.), and have sold themselves to a company that had the funds for their “skills”. So yeah, a fintech company can spend 4-8x as much on just their personnel than a regular tech company…
Then of course you have the higher leadership and C-suite who also like to pad their pockets. I did a short stint at a fintech company, and came away appalled after the CFO, during a company outing, quite drunk, told me how he’s basically pocketing about half a million GBP as his “salary” every month, not to mention the income he manages from providing “certain services” to “certain elements”… heavily implied that these elements happen to be criminal in nature. Mind you this is the same guy who tried to haggle down my annual salary during the initial interview, even though I was more skilled than the role they wanted to fill… so yeah, fintech is either 1, super lucky (see e.g. Revolut), 2, super dirty or 3, dead in the water.
I interviewed for a fintech startup once and they were the most condescending assholes I’ve ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Anecdotal, but they really left an impression.
Regulatory bullshit? I’m quite happy with the fact that I can generally trust my bank not to fuck me over in a hundred different ways, thanks to all that ‘bullshit’
I’m not talking about the banking regulatory system.
Fintech - non-bank-certified money institutes - have a lot of duplicate regulatory requirements. Things like: certify PCI-DSS for payment processing, BUT ALSO certified for some kind of local framework which matches PCI-DSS 99% but has its own certification process and expenses etc., so it’s not as simple as just “doing what’s required”.
Again, there’s a ton of regulations that are beneficial for the institutes and their customers, but there is also a lot of them that are hindrances because they’re duplicate or obsolete processes, red tape, and so on, stuff that serves little to no actual purpose but are essentially leftover regulations that have been superceded but not officially eliminated.
Fair enough, there’s nuance here as with a lot of these things. I used to work in banking IT, I’ve seen some parts of it. It was just the blanket “regulations = bad” sentiment I reacted to, though I see now that wasn’t the intent from your side
Yeah I guess I should’ve specified that when I said “bullshit regulations” I meant specifically the regulations that are truly bullshit, not that all regulations are bullshit. Freaking English and its many ways to interpret the same sentence because why could we have specificity, amirite?
Well, at least it gives us a common language… I’m not sure the discussion would go so well if I was speaking one of my other languages to you. Enjoy your evening, or morning, or whatever it’ll be on your end
LOL, fair enough.