How AI is changing jobs in fintech

Across the financial services spectrum, companies are all rushing to adopt AI, but some firms are doing it faster than others. Fintechs, including startups and publicly traded tech firms, are seeing the most immediate impacts of AI; at some places this means mass layoffs, at others it means dynamic changes to what individual roles entail.

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The biggest change in these firms is the role of the software developer. At Robinhood, more than half of code is written by AI and coding agents. At Coinbase, "roughly 100%" of code is written by AI. The day-to-day role of software engineers has transitioned to being code editors rather than code producers. Michael Abdul, CEO of fintech recruitment firm Volition, said, in some extreme cases senior engineers are writing as little as 15 lines of human code per week.

At fintechs like Ramp, employees outside of engineering functions are incentivized to vibe code their own apps. Because of this, the product manager has become mightier than ever. Abdul said that product staff are "benefitting the most" from AI as it allows them to build functioning prototypes rather than "think of an idea and pass it off to engineering." While you might assume that takes work away from engineering, it often means that an increased number of good ideas are handed to tech teams to productionize them. Checkout.com CTO Mariano Albera said at a conference in June that "every engineer I know is working a lot more hours and a lot later" because of AI.

What roles are safest from AI?

Jenna Baker, chief people officer of banking infrastructure fintech Griffin, told us "every function has work that can be automated," but the goal with AI is to automate tasks "that drain the life out of your week" and instead focus on the "work you wish you had time for." Nonetheless, roles safest from AI are "characterised by trust more than complexity." She notes that roles where customers have an "instinctive allergic reaction" to knowing a process is fully automated. Customer success, risk governance and product strategy are presumably safe.

Some fintechs have learned this the hard way. Klarna famously replaced 700 customer service employees with AI last year only to backtrack after suggesting it prioritized cost over quality. 

Roles in fintech, especially for startups and scale-ups have always required generalists. At Stripe, for example, employees would often conduct job interviews for staff outside their team and function. AI often leads to a convergence of roles but, for earlier stage fintechs, that convergence already exists. This can be good for job security, however it also means that when your colleagues leave, you might find their responsibilities pawned off on you instead of your firm hiring a replacement.

What roles are most at risk because of AI?

If you're working for a larger or publicly traded fintech, AI is much more likely to be your enemy. Several of the biggest players, including Block, Robinhood and Coinbase have all announced mass layoffs this year, attributing a change to the nature of work (and often directly because of AI). Compliance and engineering are among the divisions impacted.

The safety of your role might be dependent on your firm. Payments fintech Bolt cut a third of staff earlier this year (also citing AI), and eliminated its entire HR function as part of those cuts after claiming that the function "created problems that didn't exist." HR jobs are safer elsewhere in fintech, for now at least.

The biggest losers in this new age of fintech are junior employees, particularly within tech. Abdul said that fintechs "want senior engineers because prompting a coding agent is not that different to code reviewing and prompting a junior engineer."

Things might change if the cost of compute increases. "When the cost of licenses goes up extensively,there will be an inflection point," Abdul said. "It will be more cost effective to hire a junior developer on $60k than spending $70k on an anthropic partnership."

Return to our guide on jobs in fintech.

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