As market disruptors that challenge the established order in financial services, it is logical that fintechs should also eschew orthodoxy when it comes to management diversity.

Fintechs came to prominence during a period when more women had established careers in financial services and acquired deep expertise in areas such as payments, operations, compliance and customer experience, all of which became incredibly valuable as the industry evolved.

That is the view of Deborah Overdeput, Chief Operating Officer at Innovative Systems, who says the fact that networks were still being formed created opportunities for talented people to move into senior roles based on what they could contribute.

“Newer companies have the advantage of building their cultures and teams from the ground up, which creates an opportunity to think differently about hiring, career development and the experiences that prepare people for senior roles,” she says.

According to Patrícia Lima, Group Treasurer at Feedzai, while women remain underrepresented in executive fintech roles, the sector has a higher representation of women at mid-level leadership than the wider technology industry.

“The main reason for this is that the fintech industry is relatively young and thus less exposed to legacy hierarchies and patriarchal challenges which have prevented or delayed companies from creating more flexible, comprehensive and merit-based promotion pathways and programmes,” she says.

Fintechs are largely built on a hybrid skillset of deep finance knowledge plus genuine technical or quantitative fluency and that talent pool is actually quite narrow, so firms can’t afford to filter on anything other than capability, suggests Jackie Bowie, Senior Managing Director & Head of EMEA at Chatham Financial.

There is also a structural point: much of fintech’s growth happened over the last 15-20 years, which is exactly the period when more women were coming through STEM, quant finance and related disciplines. Therefore, the leadership cohort reflects a labour market that already looked different by the time these firms were hiring at scale.

“However, this trend seems to hold up better in product and operations leadership than it does in core engineering or technical founder roles, where the gap is still wide,” says Bowie.

She accepts that in firms that haven’t inherited decades years of legacy hierarchy there is less institutional memory reinforcing who ‘typically’ gets promoted and that flatter structures mean contribution is more visible. But she also points out that plenty of fintechs have simply reproduced the same patterns faster, so newness doesn’t remove the need for leaders to build a merit-based culture.

Ugnė Buračienė, Group CEO at payabl cautions that while progress has been made, research conducted with the European Women Payments Network earlier this year found that only around one in five respondents worked at a company where women made up at least half of the senior leadership team.

“Where fintech does have an advantage is that many companies in the sector are relatively young and have had less time to build the rigid hierarchies and established networks that can make progression harder in more traditional industries,” she says.

Fintech also values a broader mix of experience, while the absence of a single route into leadership can create more space for people with non-linear careers and different professional backgrounds.

“But being a younger industry does not automatically make fintech more equal,” adds Buračienė. “Younger companies can still reproduce the same inequalities, which often happens when they grow through personal networks, hire people who look or think like the existing leadership team, or make informal progression and pay decisions.”

Fintechs could be more open to people with different backgrounds and experiences despite broader recognition of the value that diverse leadership brings to financial strategy and corporate decision-making, agrees Aidana Zhakupbekova, Chief Operating Financial Officer at Rydoo.

She accepts that fintechs may be less tied to traditional career paths or fixed ideas about what a senior leader should look like but doesn’t believe being a fintech automatically makes a company an equal opportunity employer.

“It still comes down to the culture that a company’s leaders create and the opportunities that people are given,” says Zhakupbekova. “Mentorship and visibility matter but they need to be backed by structural change. That means creating transparent promotion pathways and equal opportunities for high value assignments.”

Valory COO, Gemma Welsh, says she stands out less and receives less dismissiveness as a young woman at crypto conferences than she did in public and third sector conferences.

She suggests the greatest impact comes from the systems of power and people within them being aligned with unlearning biases. “Otherwise, even if we hire and pay women and other disadvantaged groups, we may not be benefiting from the opinions that we are paying them to give. It is more important than ever to focus on business cases for equality.”

Chloe Coleman, CEO at Vouchsafe, is another who refers to a shift in favour of women in senior management while acknowledging that female founders remain significantly underrepresented.

“Better hiring practices are helping to create more inclusive and diverse teams and regulation can also accelerate that progress by challenging established habits and creating opportunities that may not otherwise have existed, even though, ideally, businesses would make these changes because they recognise the commercial and cultural value of diversity rather than because they are required to do so,” she says.

Coleman believes the fintech industry has benefited from being able to move away from the traditional financial services model of predominantly male leadership and rigid corporate structures, while adding that this opportunity still needs to be actively taken rather than treated as an automatic consequence of being a newer industry.

More women showing up on a slide doesn’t mean more women are being heard in the room suggests Giorgia Pellizzari, Chief Product Officer and head of custody at Hex Trust.

“I was at an industry roundtable last year and the person introducing me got my bio wrong and it wasn’t just a small typo – they just hadn’t bothered to check,” she recalls. “Everyone else on that stage (15 men) was introduced correctly. That tells you something about who gets noticed and who gets a second glance to make sure the details are right.”

Neither does Pellizzari accept that the relative ‘newness’ of fintechs means they are naturally more inclined to be equal opportunity employers, noting that what matters is passion and intent – whether leadership is actually building a mix of perspectives or just talking about it.

In terms of the characteristics required to succeed, she notes that the industry moves rapidly.

“You have to adapt without losing your footing,” says Pellizzari. “You should also be prepared to try the thing you are aiming to build and learn from others – and if you have nailed that point, trust your own reading. Your instinct will get you places if you can differentiate it from the noise inside you.”

The personal qualities that matter most include genuine fluency across disciplines, suggests Bowie. “You need enough command of both the financial and technical sides of the business that you are not dependent on a translator in either direction,” she says. “That is a real differentiator at senior level, especially in risk-facing roles where a decision has to hold up against both market/commercial logic and system logic simultaneously.”

Beyond that, she recommends comfort with ambiguity, the ability to be decisive in the absence of complete information and the capacity to translate complexity clearly.

Buračienė highlights the importance of curiosity – observing that there is no point at which you can assume you know enough – and the growing significance of commercial discipline.

“The period when growth alone could excuse weak economics is over and leaders need to understand where value is being created, where resources are being wasted and what the business can sustain,” she says. “Above all, you need to build strong teams.”

For women specifically, she advocates authenticity and notes that there is still an expectation that female leaders should be confident but not too confident and decisive but not too direct.

Priorities are also incredibly important, says Zhakupbekova. “You need to take a step back and ask if this is contributing to the top three things you need to achieve this year or this quarter. There will always be more work to do, especially in a scale-up, so you have to know where your attention will make the biggest difference.”

Welsh refers to grit and conviction as key personal attributes required to succeed at the highest levels of an industry where you have to ‘ship early and ship often’ but also have to be disciplined enough to ship something that feels genuinely useful and remains useful once the hype cycle has moved on.

According to Coleman, fintech leaders require complete conviction in their team, their product and its potential.

“At times, that conviction has to border on obsession, because building a fintech business requires enormous resilience, energy and belief,” she concludes. “However, conviction has to be balanced with a willingness to do the hard things, confront problems early and make choices that may not always be popular but are right for the business.”