Financial Technology · Executive search
FinTech hiring, done right.
Where compliance, scale, and regulator-readiness all hire differently.
Grant's record in FinTech
- Placements
- 486
- Avg savings/hire
- ~$65K
- Typical base
- $220–380K
- Y1 retention
- 92%
The view from 30 years
How FinTech hiring is genuinely different.
FinTech leaders don't just need product chops. They need to navigate state regulators, payment networks, fraud-and-risk infrastructure, and a board that asks compliance questions before product questions. Grant has placed leaders across payments, lending, regtech, crypto, and B2B SaaS — every one of them tested against the same hidden bar: can this person ship in front of a federal examiner?
Three signals
What we screen for that generalists miss.
Compliance is a top-5 hiring criterion, not an HR concern
A VP Engineering in fintech who can't articulate KYC, AML, and PCI-DSS to the comp committee is a Day-1 risk. We screen for regulatory fluency before scaling experience — the reverse of how most tech recruiters work.
Pattern recognition matters more than category match
Stripe alumni stay 40% longer in payment-adjacent startups than ex-Google folks with equivalent titles. We've watched this pattern play out across 486 placements. It informs every shortlist.
Comp bands are aggressive — and equity expectations volatile
Crypto-adjacent candidates may want options-heavy packages; traditional fintech candidates want base + bonus stability. Pricing the offer wrong loses you the candidate in the negotiation. We model both before you make an offer.
The pattern we see most often
Hiring a generic SaaS leader into a regulated environment
We've seen this kill three searches in the last 18 months. A talented VP Product from a horizontal SaaS company joins a payments startup, spends six weeks discovering compliance isn't a 'feature' to be bolted on, and by month four is either rebuilding the team or being rebuilt by it. We screen this out at the phone-screen stage.
Has the candidate ever directly responded to a regulator inquiry? Not 'helped a team' — directly authored the response. Most candidates haven't. The ones who have are 3× less likely to flinch when it happens in their first quarter.
The signal we look for
Recent placements
Anonymized — but real.
Every placement in the last 18 months. Client names and personal details withheld; structure and timeline are exact.
Where we source
The companies we mine for FinTech leaders.
Primary feeders supply roughly 60% of our shortlists. Adjacent industries fill the rest — Grant's pattern recognition tells us which non-obvious feeders punch above their weight for this vertical.
Primary feeders
Adjacent industries
- Traditional Banking
- Insurance Tech
- Crypto Native
FinTech executive search
Your next FinTech hire, without the recruiter premium.
Tell us about the role. You'll get Grant's FinTech playbook, applied to your company, in under 10 minutes.