While most industries are still reeling under pressure from the ongoing pandemic and trimming workforce, India’s fintech companies seem to be bucking the trend and going on a hiring spree. According to the TeamLease Employment outlook report, there was a 40% increase in the number of interviews conducted by fintech companies in Q1 this year as compared to the same period last year.
Over a dozen fintech companies have been on a hiring frenzy recently including slice, Razorpay, PhonePe, Instamojo, Moneytap, ClearTax and Signzy.
The COVID induced digitisation for lending and growing adoption of digital payments is pushing fintech companies in India to scale faster, leading to expansion and strengthening of teams, especially the top deck.
Digital payments platform PhonePe has also been on a hiring spree amid the pandemic. Despite the lockdown, the company has hired 500 people across roles since the end of February taking the employee strength to 2200. It has over 300 more open positions.
Manmeet Sandhu, Chief People Officer, PhonePe says, “During the lockdown, we have had employees joining us remotely and their induction and onboarding were done remotely in a seamless manner. We still have over 300 open positions currently which we aim to fill this year.”
The hiring comes as the company plans to expand its offline merchant network from 11 million currently to 25 million by the end of 2021 across India’s rural and semi-urban areas. This will involve employing about 10,000 people from the locally available talent pools across the country to service its merchants. Separately, the company is hiring for a variety of roles across engineering and non-engineering functions such as business development, product management, merchant acquisition, marketing, finance, legal etc.
Manmeet says, “Our transaction volume for July was at 620 million transactions that surpassed the February 2020 levels (pre-lockdown).”
RazorPay is also looking to hire 100 more in the coming months across various levels.
Anuradha Bharat, Head - People Operations, Razorpay believes the FinTech sector is at its exciting best right now as everyone wants to have an e-commerce presence. “While there are massive layoffs happening around, we are seeing this as an opportunity to hire great minds and make quality additions to build a league of next-gen payment and banking solutions to help with the current circumstances. We've already onboarded over 120 employees in the last 2 months and we are looking at adding 200 more across levels in the next few months, primarily for our product and engineering teams.”
Slice, India’s payments and credit startup exclusively for youngsters, last month appointed Sudhesh Chandrasekar, former CFO at MFI Spandana Sphoorty, as its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Chandrasekar is not the first big hire for the company. In the last two months, the firm has been looking to bolster its leadership team, also having hired a new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and a head of designs. slice will be hiring 20-25 employees over the next 6-8 months, with 15-20 people in the tech and product team and 5-6 people in the senior level roles in the marketing team.
The hiring is thanks to growth coming from a sharp rise in e-commerce transactions across all categories from existing customers.
Rajan Bajaj, Founder & CEO, slice says, “We are looking to hire more people aggressively right now to support growth. Over the past few months, we onboarded Head of design, Head of Collections, Associate Directors, people in Business, finance, debt raising. Now we are looking to hire people in the product and engineering team as our constant focus has been to improve customer experience. We aim to reach a million customers in the next 12-15 months. With a dynamic and young 280-member team, currently, we plan to grow about 30-40% in the next 6-7 months or so.”
Signzy, a B2B fintech firm is looking to hire over 70 employees in the next 6 months. According to Co-founder Ankit Ratan, “In the last four months, the demand for digitalised workflow solutions, including video-KYC, has gone near universal among the BFSI players. Naturally, we have to scale up our team strength to meet this demand.”
Fintech firm Moneytap has already hired more than 50 people in the last 6 months and is actively hiring some top talent in the coming months. The company has virtually onboarded more than 20 people during the lockdown period.
Bala Parthasarathy, CEO & Co-founder, MoneyTap says, “We plan to hire 100 people across technology, data science, operations, customer relations and marketing, with most of the hiring to be at the junior/associate levels in the coming months.”
MoneyTap is back to doing over 60% of the pre-COVID numbers and expects to soon be at 100% by the festive season at the end of this year.
Among other firms, while Instamojo is looking to expand its product and engineering team, ClearTax is in the process of hiring 20% more people in its engineering and design team.