This year so far has not been good for those in IT jobs, with many software and tech-led e-commerce companies laying off people at a mass scale.

However, fintech is one sector that has witnessed a surge in hiring activity with companies are scaling up their operations on the back of the government’s heightened focus on financial innovation to make India a cash-free economy.

According to data collated by BusinessLine from over two dozen fintech firms, the sector is likely to generate over 5,000 jobs this fiscal, and most of the companies are recruiting in areas such as data science, data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Companies such as FINO PayTech, PolicyBazaar are hiring around 1,000 each, while ZestMoney, Trupay, ClearTax, Lendingkart, Innoviti, Coverfox, BankBazaar, NeoGrowth, FundsIndia and Scripbox are almost doubling their technology teams.

“We are looking at a significant number of employees who will bring the right skill sets to the table, including engineers, front-end developers and others from IT companies,” said Chetna Gogia, Director-HR, PayU India, a payment solution provider. “We are looking to hire people across levels, specifically at mid and senior levels — those with a sound understanding of tech and who can add value to our upcoming services and products.”

Lizzie Chapman, co-founder and CEO, ZestMoney, said: “The application of fintech cuts across various business segments, including lending and payments. Currently, we are a healthy mix of 55 members, and expect to double our team size to over 100 by mid-2018. We will be looking to increase the strength our data science and tech team by over 100 per cent this year.”

A recent report by job search portal Naukri said that in overall new job creation, the IT-software industry was hit the most during May ’17 with 17 per cent decline in hiring compared with May ’16. The banking and financial sector was up 16 per cent.

Sudeep Kumar Sen, Assistant Vice-President at recruitment firm Teamlease Services, added that the fintech sector will bring in18-25 per cent employment growth opportunity.

“Fintech is the future as many small merchants and low-income consumers are gradually moving to online platforms for daily transactions, loans and other financial requirements such as remittance.

“There has been a paradigm shift in how consumers carry out financial transactions. The fintech firms are also investing heavily on innovation through artificial intelligence to bring in localisation in services and provide personalised experience through predictive analytics,” Sen said.

A recent report by Capgemini and the European Financial Management Association said China and India distinguished themselves by having the highest percentages (55-60 per cent) of Gen Y and tech-savvy customers using financial services from non-traditional firms.

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