Part 5 — This Very Original Fintech Culture
Over the past six years in the US, as the head of fintech sales for IDEMIA, I have had the chance to work with all market leaders including Square, Stripe, Robinhood, Marqeta, SoFi, Galileo, Varo and more than fifty others. …
I have described in the previous post, this culture of excellence in the products and services offered, this app-centric innovation offer implemented by smart, young and hardworking individuals. Today, I will focus on their very original internal culture that we should not underestimate.
At the forefront of the American trend for more diversity and professional ethics, fintechs speak loud and clear about their program, and their employees reinforce this message. Throughout the Trump presidency, most fintechs have been seen resisting through actions or social media posts. Particularly iconic is Square, whose CEO Jack Dorsey is also the CEO of Twitter who ultimately decided to cut the President’s account. A few months earlier, he had decided to donate $1 billion, 28% of his net worth to charities.
Diversity is a reality within fintechs, even if they themselves consider that a lot of progress remains to be made, among other things on gender parity within the technical teams. That’s why they promote programs like Girls Who Code to educate girls about engineering jobs.
But diversity goes much further, well beyond just gender neutral restrooms. If someone in Europe is used to companies publishing a Sustainability Report in addition to their Annual Report, she will be amazed to see some fintechs publish an Inclusion and Diversity Report [1] where we can learn amongst other things about their employees’ sexual orientation,
Also public is the breakdown by sex (40% women), gender or race ethnicity (20.9% under-represented minorities), etc.
Fintechs also try to promote moral values in their offering and to have a positive impact on society by rejecting and sanctioning corruption and anti-democratic tendencies.
Let’s not be naive. My point here is not to give a postcard illusion of a perfect world, of course, but to underscore an objective, an effort that I think is very commendable. Not all is perfect in fintechs as elsewhere, but there is in their corporate culture a genuine desire to influence political and social choices that is new, worth mentioning and laudable.
I could also have spoken in this post about dress codes but, on the one hand, fashions change too quickly for me to follow, and working from home due to the pandemic has dramatically changed the situation: you don’t dress the same way to go to the office and for a Zoom meeting.
Fintechs like to see themselves as very different from traditional banks, even in opposition to them
One last, essential point in the fintech culture. Fintechs don’t see themselves as banks, don’t want to see themselves as banks, and even see themselves in opposition to banks. Think of SoFi’s Super Bowl ad showing the deserted offices of traditional banks and concluding “This is the beginning of a bankless world. Don’t bank. SoFi”, or the European N26’ mantra: “The first bank you will love”, etc.
It is by taking a clear cultural opposition to banks that they have created their success: the Robinhood app looks much more like a social media app, or even a game, than the client interface of a traditional financial institution.
And it works, because today fintechs are all about growth, unbridled growth, that’s what we’ll see in the next post.
— All opinions shared in these posts are my own —
- [1] Square Inclusion & Diversity, Sep. 2019
