Executive Search in Fintech

Fintech searches fail at a predictable point — not in sourcing, but in definition.

The brief arrives: VP of Engineering, or Chief Risk Officer, or Head of Compliance. The hiring manager knows what they want. But the specification reveals the problem immediately: they need someone who has operated at the intersection of financial services rigour and technology velocity. Someone who has shipped product fast and answered to a regulator. Someone who understands both the engineering and the audit trail.

Most search firms work one side of that intersection. The financial services networks don't reach the people building payments infrastructure at Series B fintechs. The tech networks don't reach the executives who've run a BNPL compliance function through a regulatory inquiry. The candidate who fits both descriptions is real — there are more of them than most briefs assume — but finding them requires working both markets simultaneously with a view of the whole.

When firms work only one side, they produce candidates who are technically qualified for half the job. The hiring manager rejects them. The brief gets re-opened. The clock runs.

What the fintech search context actually requires

The structural difficulty in fintech executive search is not candidate scarcity. It is positioning accuracy — being specific enough about which intersection a role sits at that the right candidates self-identify, and generic enough that the search doesn't exclude people unfairly.

A VP of Product in a B2C payments company has a materially different profile from a VP of Product in a B2B lending platform. A CTO at a regulated banking-as-a-service provider has different constraints than a CTO at a crypto infrastructure company. These distinctions matter for where you look, what you say when you reach out, and how you evaluate fit.

The brief that doesn't make these distinctions produces a wide search that generates volume without precision. The brief that overcorrects produces a narrow search that can't close.

Getting this right requires market knowledge that is specific to fintech — who the relevant operators are, where they came from, which companies have produced the talent the market is currently looking for. That knowledge is not available from a job board. It is built from working the market consistently over time.

Compensation benchmarking at the intersection

Fintech compensation creates a secondary problem: the candidates who sit at the finance-technology intersection frequently have equity from prior companies, deferred bonuses from banking roles, or risk-adjusted compensation structures that make like-for-like comparison difficult.

A search that benchmarks purely against tech VP comp mispositions for finance-track candidates. A search that benchmarks against banking director comp levels mispositions for startup-native operators. The candidate who has done both expects compensation that reflects both — and will decline an offer that doesn't.

This is a solvable problem, but only if the search firm has done enough fintech mandates to have built a reliable view of what these candidates actually accept.

What a disciplined fintech search looks like

The searches that close in five to six weeks share a structural characteristic: the brief is precise before outreach begins. Not more detailed — precise. It distinguishes between the regulatory exposure required and the regulatory exposure that would merely be welcome. It specifies the growth stage context the hire needs to have operated in. It identifies the two or three companies that are the best indicators of relevant experience.

Outreach built on a precise brief gets responses. It reads as peer-level — specific to the candidate's actual background, not a mass message to everyone with "fintech" in their LinkedIn headline. Response rates are the leading indicator of whether a search will close in five weeks or fourteen.

Majhi Group runs retained fintech executive searches. 30–45 days against the 65–90 day industry median. The search assessment takes 20 minutes and focuses on whether the brief is currently constructed to close — not on selling a process.

If a fintech VP or C-suite search has been running longer than eight weeks without a shortlist, request an assessment.