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Hiring the best freelance FinTech advisors

If you’re the founder of a FinTech company, maybe you think that financial experts are too expensive to hire full-time. But if you don’t have any finance background, it may be difficult for you to manage the business without hiring a specialist.

This article explores both of these issues and explains how a consultant can help your company avoid mistakes and make more money. This is an introduction to a blog post discussing what skills a fintech advisor should have and what types of expertise would be useful for running this type of business.

What Skills a FinTech Advisor Should Have?

There are five skills that a FinTech advisor should have:

1. Financial Understanding – Understanding of the fundamental issues of financial markets and economy; this is key for running a fin-tech company.

2. Quantitative Skills – Understanding and ability to work with quantitative data and financial models; this is very important for finding product-market fit and gaining maximum value from your data.

3. Communication – The ability to communicate with different types of people; this includes both technical people who understand how to use technology, as well as non-technical people such as top management, finance, legal, compliance or marketing departments.

4. Leadership Skills – The ability to lead and motivate your team; especially true if you are hiring freelancers or specialists, who may have different opinions than you, but you need to be able to work together successfully.

5. General Management – The ability to manage all aspects of the company, including finance, technology, people etc., successfully; this requires creativity and flexibility since there are many unknowns in the industry of FinTech.

What Type of Expertise Would Be Useful?

There are three types of expertise that would be useful for running a FinTech company: investment banking, software development and financial technology itself (e.g., blockchain).

1. Investment Banking – Required if you want to raise capital or raise investment. You can do this either as a private investor, or as an investment bank itself, if you already work there. Some examples of people who worked in investment banking are the founder of Kreditech (former CFO at Credit Suisse), the founder of Private Wealth Management (former VP of Quantitative Research at Credit Suisse). However, not everyone who worked in investment banking is able to advise FinTech companies; this is because it requires specialist knowledge and skills, which are hard for non-FinTech people to acquire.

2. Software Development – If your company is building software products which can be sold (e.g. online marketplace for financial products), you will need software developers who can build your product or someone who has the skills to manage them.

3. Financial Technology – The founders of TransferWise, Wealthfront and Coinbase all used their technical expertise in the financial technology within the companies that they founded. Their expertise is in developing new technology which improves or changes how traditional financial technology works (e.g., blockchain implementation in the banking industry). This is different from implementation of FinTech; this means putting already existing technologies in place, which usually does not require too much technical knowledge (e.g., implementation of payment solutions). FinTech technology is not only limited to FinTech companies; many FinTech founders also work for financial institutions (e.g., Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch), which means that they would use their experience to advise FinTechs or build new startups.

Summary

FinTech software products are no longer only within financial services; they are now used in many different industries (e.g., travel, insurance). If you want to build a FinTech company, it is recommended to hire an expert who has both knowledge about the industry, as well as the relevant skills for all aspects of running a company.