Silicon Valley Bank Collapse: Should you consider a new fintech job?

Three fintech job ideas from Jobbio's Kirstie McDermott.

With Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) collapse dominating column inches, those working in the wider startup sector are understandably nervous about what is next.

SVB was one of a trifecta of U.S. banks that failed last week, including Silvergate Capital and Signature Bank, known as the two main banks for crypto companies. SVB provided banking services to more than 2,500 venture capital firms, as well as almost half the U.S’ VC-backed technology and life-science companies.

Its reach was beyond the United States: the UK arm, SVB UK, is reported to hold $3bn of venture capital-backed firms' funds, or more than 300 companies. According to Reuters, more than a third of these could risk running into cash-flow difficulties within a month. 

Rescue measures

To prevent that from happening, the UK government and the Bank of England orchestrated a private sale of the UK operation to HSBC for a symbolic £1 and stipulated that customer deposits are to be protected.

Similar rescue measures have been undertaken in the U.S. where the federal government has said it will guarantee all deposits for SVB and Signature depositors. 

Looking at the bigger picture, things are still shaky. More than $70 billion was wiped off the cryptocurrency market’s value, and in Europe, banks had their worst day in a year on the pan-European Stoxx 600, which closed down 2.34 per cent on Monday. By Tuesday things had improved, with the FTSE opening down, but steadying.

With fears of contagion, or the worry that a domino effect could occur with other banks failing, as well as knocking on into the wider financial system, it is no wonder people are nervous. 

Positive outlook

There is a more positive outlook for those working in the London and wider UK fintech sector. London has long been at the forefront of financial services, and it has taken to seachanges in the industry with gusto: 56 per cent of traditional financial institutions have put disruption at the heart of their strategy, according to the UK FinTech State of the Nation report.

The report also states that London has the world’s highest concentration of financial and professional service firms at 64,000, and around 76,500 people work in the sector UK-wide, with that number set to grow to 105,500 by 2030.

A global workforce of talented individuals, access to funding and a regulatory framework that includes the Financial Conduct Authority’s sandbox (where companies can test their technology), all speak to growth. “Overall, it is very clear that the FCA sandbox has delivered real value to firms,” says Deloitte.

If you are in the market for a new job this year, and want to see what’s out there before you make a leap, there are thousands of open roles available on the AltFi Job Board, like the three below.

Site Reliability Engineer, GoCardless, London

As a Site Reliability Engineer at GoCardless, you'll be part of a small team that sets the direction of the GoCardless core stack. You’ll work on workloads in Kubernetes, and with a large list of technologies in play, you won't be expected to have experience with all of them, but enthusiasm about the infrastructure space, and the impact your work can have on others, is key. To apply, you will need to showcase skills in writing clean code, covered by tests, in one or more programming languages, for example, Go and Ruby. You’ll have knowledge of deploying scalable and resilient applications in a containerised environment too. Additionally, you will have experience in building scalable and fault-tolerant infrastructure in the cloud. Find the full details for this job here.

Senior Full Stack Engineer, MoonPay, London

MoonPay builds web3 infrastructure for the crypto economy, and is hiring a Senior Full Stack Engineer to architect and develop new and existing products and features, work with product managers to come up with the best solutions and implementation plans, and implement UX and UI in MoonPay’s customer facing app. You’ll scale systems to support our ever growing partner and consumer base and write fully tested, high quality and performant code on both backend and frontend. If you have extensive engineering experience at leading startups or fast growing tech companies and are comfortable working a full stack role on the front and backend, this could be the perfect fit. See more on this role’s responsibilities here.

Fraud Analyst, Cleo, London

Cleo is building an AI to empower people to make better financial decisions. As the Fraud Analyst, you will be the lead on the fraud team, ensuring Cleo can move fast by leveraging rich user data to see insights turned into real impact in cutting down fraud rates. You will work with multiple third-party partners, assessing their capabilities, determining their potential impact on Cleo, and integrating their data sources into our internal decision-making frameworks. You'll require multiple years of experience doing quantitative analysis within a digital product environment, solid SQL experience, and the ability to dig deep through various data sources to find insights. Experience in an adversarial risk prevention or detection space, whether in community integrity, fincrime prevention, or account security is an advantage. Find out everything you need to know about this position now.

Browse the AltFi Job Board to find your perfect role today