Why to Get Into Fintech
Here’s the thing about fintech careers. Everyone asks how to break in, but few people talk about why you’d want to.
Let me make the case.
Everything you can see, reach out and touch, or imagine achieving requires money. Schools, hospitals, medicine, all move when money moves. When you understand it, you can understand how to create the kind of impact in the world that really moves the market.
Fintech is maybe 3% penetrated globally. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s possible when you rebuild financial services from first principles using technology. That $5 trillion market opportunity isn’t shrinking – it’s compounding.
That’s the career bet. Get into an industry that’s 3% done and ride the curve.
The Roles That Exist in Fintech
Fintech isn’t just engineers and founders. The ecosystem needs:
Product managers who understand both the customer problem and the regulatory constraints.
Engineers who can work with legacy systems, APIs, and the peculiar challenges of moving money.
Compliance and risk professionals who get that good compliance isn’t a blocker – it’s a competitive advantage.
Operations people who can handle the messiness of real-world financial services.
Business development professionals who understand the dance between fintechs, banks, and regulators.
Skills That Transfer
If you worked in banking: You understand the problems fintech is trying to solve. You know what’s broken. That institutional knowledge is genuinely valuable.
If you worked in tech: You understand how modern products get built. The finance-specific knowledge can be learned.
If you worked in neither: Domain expertise in something – healthcare, real estate, small business – can translate directly into understanding vertical fintech opportunities.
The gap is always learnable. The question is whether you’re curious enough to fill it.
How to Break In
Read obsessively. Subscribe to newsletters that cover the space deeply, Fintech Takes, Fintech Business Weekly, and Net Interest Substack to start with. Check out Rex Salisbury on Youtube. Build pattern recognition.
Show up. Fintech conferences like Money20/20, Fintech NerdCon, and the countless smaller events are where relationships form .Attend your local This Week in Fintech meetup.
Get on Fintech Twitter. The X/Twitter fintech community punches way above its weight. Follow the people building, not just the people commenting.
Do the homework first. Don’t ask people to teach you what you could Google or hit an LLM with. Come with specific questions.
What to Learn
Payments basics. Understand how money actually moves – card networks, ACH, wire transfers, real-time payments, and now stablecoins. Visa doesn’t move money; banks do. Most payment systems send messages, like emails. Money only moves when the banks update their database.
Banking basics. Banks are not like vaults. There’s no big box full of money. When your salary gets deposited, you’re effectively lending that money to them. But they get to use it as funding to make even more loans. How? Through a process called maturity transformation. It’s a complex idea, but once it clicks, everything else makes sense.
The war stories. Others have been there, experienced the pain, understand what they tried, and why it didn’t work. Finance has universal laws like physics. If you understand them, you can shape the universe.
The regulatory landscape. You don’t need to become a lawyer, but you should understand what a banking charter means, how fintech companies partner with banks, what PCI compliance involves.
The stack. Know the difference between a core banking system, a ledger, an issuer processor, and a BaaS provider.
One Last Thing
The fintech community is full of people who got here through unconventional paths. We’re generally happy to help others do the same.
If I can ever help a fellow fintech nerd, reply any newsletter email. I genuinely mean that.
ST.
