- Key insight: At top-rated fintechs, employees say they value remote work and autonomy.
- What's at stake: Banks that insist on rigid back-to-office policies limit their options for recruiting talented leaders.
- Forward look: Some fintechs are starting to require limited in-office days; banks may well soften their in-office policies to accommodate a post-Covid generation used to flexibility.
Three trends stood out among this year's class of Best Fintechs to Work For: These companies are offering remote work, "meaningful" work and autonomy.
The three attributes give them advantages over many banks and credit unions trying to hire talented workers and executives, especially those that require employees to be in the office full-time, according to Robert Voth, managing director at executive recruiting firm Russell Reynolds Associates.
"When you make that corporate culture decision of relocation is a must, realize you have two things against you, day one: a competitive marketplace in the fintechs that are saying 'Be wherever you want,' and a [post-Covid] generation who aren't used to being asked [to relocate]. And so when we ask them, it's, 'I don't have to,'" Voth said. "There's another universe that's welcoming those individuals to stay at home."
For any bank not in a major metropolitan area, forcing people to commute and relocate can knock out 60% to 80% of potential candidates, Voth said. And during the pandemic shutdown, executives and managers reconsidered what they look for in a company, with many making meaningful work a priority.
Leaders of some of the Best Fintechs to Work For shared with American Banker the practices that have made them popular.
Remote work
Remote and flexible work was the top factor cited among employees of the Best Fintechs to Work For.
The big banks' back-to-office mandate "has not yet caught up with the general gestalt of the executive world that has said, 'I have other choices,'" Voth said.
Companies that demand employees to come to a specific location to work may have to offer higher compensation packages and have lower talent retention, he said.
CorServ, an Atlanta-based fintech that provides credit card issuance and is ranked seventh on this year's Best Fintechs to Work For list, has had a remote working environment since it was founded in 2009, according to CEO Anil Goyal.
"We wanted to hire the best talent, and not be limited to proximity," Goyal told American Banker. "We set up an environment where there's a strong sense of personal accountability, and people take pride in their work."
Hometap, which is ranked 15th on the list, also offers 100% remote work, though it has an office in Boston and rents WeWork space in a few other cities. Hometap offers home equity advances; in exchange for a cash lump sum, homeowners give Hometap a percentage of their home's future value, repayable upon selling or after 10 years.
Employees "are looking for flexibility in how they set up their work life as relates to their home life," Andrea Garvey, Hometap's chief people officer, told American Banker. "We spend a lot of time at work, but we value people as whole human beings, and there's some flexibility in being able to do a [school] drop off or a pickup as needed." People also care about compensation, time off and benefits, she noted.
At the other end of the remote work flexibility spectrum is AI-based lending software startup Cascading AI, which was founded in 2023 and is ranked 13th on the Best Fintechs to Work For list. Its employees not only come into its San Francisco office five days a week, but frequently stay late and come to the office on weekends, often with their dogs and family members in tow.
"For us, the office is the place where someone hosts a birthday party, or someone on the weekend makes waffles for the rest of the team," Lukas Haffer, Cascading AI's founder and CEO, told American Banker. "I'm getting married in October. I'll be hosting one of the brunches after my wedding at the office. It's partly because so many people from the Cascading AI team are part of [the wedding], but we are decidedly a group of people that enjoy spending time with each other and being in the same place."
Some employees got tired and burned out from the isolation of being in their home offices during Covid, Haffer said. "They wanted to be with a group of people that are just as mission-driven and excited as they are. Even for folks that are somewhat newer to the team, in the evening, their boyfriends or girlfriends come to pick them up and then hang out for another hour and sit on a beanbag and pull out their laptop and do something. It is really just a nice place to be."
Meaningful work
At some high-ranking fintechs, employees say they appreciate "meaningful work." This is a term that's hard to define and means different things to different people. Like remote work, people are insisting on it more post-Covid.
Executives and top talent are now looking for meaning in their personal lives and rethinking the 70-hour workweek, or taking 200 work trips a year, Voth said. When people think about meaning, they think about their family, their physical health and their mental health.
"We're hearing those discussions when decisions are being made more than we have ever heard that before," Voth said. Before Covid, this was nonexistent, he said.
At Cascading AI, or Casca, meaning comes from helping small-business owners get Small Business Administration loans. Haffer grew up in a small town in Germany where his parents worked at small businesses and struggled during the financial recession of 2008-2009.
"I remember them sitting me and my two siblings down at the kitchen table, saying we would all have to make some sacrifices to keep the lights on, and we would most likely lose our home," Haffer recalled. "It was because some bankers on Wall Street decided that maximizing their own profits was more important than those kids."
Haffer decided not to become a scientist or an engineer like his parents, "because clearly, the world is not run by those people. The world is run by businessmen," he said. "And so if a couple of bad businessmen on the other side of the planet could have such a big bad impact, then maybe a couple of good businessmen could have a big positive impact on the world."
Casca helps get loans to small-business owners "that otherwise would fall prey to a predatory online lender that would charge them an arm and a leg and would cause them to land in a debt spiral," Haffer said.
Once a month, the company invites small-business owners to come in and tell stories about why they started their businesses and how SBA loans have helped them. Often, a group of 40 engineers and product designers sit in a circle and listen. "You have people sitting there feeling the weight of that and realizing that what we do, the late night that I worked to make that one thing a little bit easier, it mattered," Haffer said.
People who come to work at Hometap are also looking for work that is meaningful, Garvey said.
"Hometap is on a mission to make homeownership more accessible and less stressful," she said.
The company has helped more than 26,000 homeowners pay off debt, make home improvements, start a business, put kids through college or buy a second home, she said.
"People can really see the direct impact of their work, and how that does help people get out of a financial crunch, if they are in one, or otherwise have more access to bettering their lives in some way," Garvey said. "And we share some of those stories."
Some customers have used the cash to get medical treatment. In other cases, customers have lost a partner or spouse who was the primary earner, so they have had difficulty getting traditional financing even though they still have equity in their home. The credit allows them to continue living in their homes with their families.
Meaningful work at CorServ takes the form of high satisfaction marks from clients, Goyal said. Project milestones are recognized, to keep that sense of purpose going. Software releases are celebrated and special efforts are recognized in monthly all-hands meetings.
Autonomy
At Cascading AI, programmers and engineers sit down with loan officers at bank clients to understand what they do and what problems they would like to solve. Then they come back, show the underwriters what they've built and get feedback.
This leads to "incredible autonomy and an incredibly fast iteration cycle, because you are not waiting for a customer representative to talk to a business analyst at the customer side, who talks to a program manager, who talks to a subject-matter expert, maybe. And then on your side, there's a product manager, and then there's an engineer, and it's a seven-people chain, and no one gets to make their decisions on their own," Haffer said. "Instead, you collapse the entire chain and you put the engineer right next to the subject-matter expert, and they get to make all the decisions right away. They are completely autonomous."
Autonomy is also important at CorServ, where half the employees are software developers.
"We hire people who are good at what they do, and we don't want to tell them every small thing that they need to do," Goyal said. "We just give them the tools for them to do their job right and trust them to solve the problems at the right level, without needing layers of approval. And that keeps us agile."
