Fintech sits at the point where financial services meets deep technical skill, and both halves are tight on talent. Demand for AI skills increased nearly 200 percent in a year, with London accounting for 80 percent of AI-related job postings and nearly two-thirds of all technology vacancies in the UK, according to Accenture data reported by The Register. That concentration tells you something important: the people you want are clustered, competed for and often already employed.
The regulated side of fintech adds another layer. In the financial services sector, recruitment was generally for Regulatory Qualification Framework (RQF) 6+ roles, rather than RQF 3-5, as set out in the GOV.UK Temporary Shortage List Stage 2 report. In plain terms, fintech employers are chasing senior, degree-level and specialist people, not entry-level hires, which raises the bar on how carefully you need to assess.
The supply picture is shifting too. During London Tech Week 2025, the UK government announced a partnership to upskill 7.5 million UK workers in essential AI skills by 2030, equivalent to around 20% of the UK workforce, as reported by techUK. More AI-capable people are coming, but not fast enough to ease the pressure on fintech teams hiring today.
Fintech hiring runs on two overlapping talent pools: engineers who build the platform and specialists who keep it compliant. For the engineering profession, the vast majority of new hires come from the resident labour force, indicating low reliance on international recruitment, per GOV.UK's review of professionals in IT and engineering. So for most engineering roles, your standard has to work brilliantly on home-grown talent first.
Pay dynamics vary by role. Top technology firms can pay sizeable wages to skilled migrants, leading to wages far above the salary threshold, while pay for engineering professionals on the Skilled Worker route is broadly in line with the UK average, according to the Migration Advisory Committee's report on IT and engineering professionals. The lesson for a cross-border standard: judge people on demonstrable skill, not on where they happen to be hired.
The direction of travel is growth. For the total of AI-related occupations, the net change ranges from approximately 696,000 jobs in the Automation Scenario to 1,072,000 in the Technological Opportunities Scenario, with replacement demand rising from 3,077,000 to 3,193,000 jobs across these scenarios, projects GOV.UK's AI skills labour market projections. Whatever scenario plays out, fintech teams will keep hiring AI-adjacent people at scale, which is exactly why one repeatable standard matters.
Start by writing the standard down. Define the skills, the evidence you will accept for each one, and the threshold that counts as a pass, before you see a single CV. When the criteria are fixed in advance, two hiring managers in two countries reach the same decision about the same person. That consistency is the whole point of a standard that travels.
Speed protects quality here. In a market where London alone accounts for 80 percent of AI-related job postings per Accenture data reported by The Register, a slow process loses the best people to a faster competitor. A consistent standard and a quick process are not in tension: the clearer your criteria, the faster you can act on them.
Finally, make the standard portable by design. The same scoring, the same evidence, the same bar should apply whether you are hiring your fifth engineer or your fiftieth across three countries. That is how you keep fairness and quality intact as you scale.
We built our AI recruitment agent to apply one consistent, skills-based standard every time, so your criteria hold the same whether the role sits in one office or several. We search a database of 15 million candidates and manage recruitment end to end, from a ranked shortlist to a booked interview. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. If you are scaling a fintech team across borders, book a demo and see the standard work on your next role.
