FinTech’s new reality: from burn rate to profitability and the human shift behind it. (Singapore FinTech Festival 2025)
- B van Heezik
- Nov 4
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 11
Day One in Singapore FinTech Festival had a clear message: FinTech is growing up.
What used to be a story about hypergrowth, fundraising rounds, and “move fast and break things” is now a story about discipline, regulatory trust, ecosystem collaboration, and talent that can adapt in real time.
Across conversations on profitability, scaling from “burn rate to unicorn,” ecosystem building, and the talent/skills gap, three big trends emerged, and they all have direct implications for hiring and for people trying to build a career in FinTech today.
1. The era of “growth at all costs” is over, investors now want proof, not promises.
Investors around the table made it very clear: there is still money in the market, but capital is now selective, disciplined, and focused on companies that can show real metrics, not just momentum. One investor put it bluntly: it’s no longer enough to say “we’ve hired 250 people” headcount is not value. What matters is revenue growth (preferably double-digit and recurring), a credible path to being cashflow positive, and cost discipline so expenses don’t outrun income. In other words, being “exciting” is not the same as being fundable.
Founders were also challenged to answer a different version of the classic “How’s the company doing?” question. The strongest answer is no longer “we’re scaling headcount” or even “we’ll be cashflow positive soon.” The strongest answer is “our revenue is growing at a healthy rate, quarter on quarter, and we’re converting that growth into durable economics.”
This mindset shift is visible not only at late stage (Series C and beyond), but even at the earliest stages. There’s less tolerance for long, expensive journeys to product-market fit. The signal investors are rewarding is disciplined growth, not burn-fueled land grabs.
Hiring impact:
Because of this, FinTech boards are starting to favor operators who can link their function directly to revenue, margin, or capital efficiency. In practical terms:
Commercial leaders who can open or grow profitable corridors, not just “expand footprint.”
Risk and compliance leaders who accelerate approvals instead of slowing them.
Product leaders who can ship revenue-bearing features in regulated categories (payments, lending, wealth).
Talent that can explain its impact in unit economics terms is getting to the front of the line.
Candidate takeaway:
If you’re going into an interview and you still lead with “I built a team of 40,” you’re signaling the wrong era. Lead with:
How you drove revenue per headcount,
How you shortened sales or licensing cycles,
How you improved margin or reduced regulatory drag.
Show that you understand that “runway” is not infinite anymore.
2. Scale now means: build lean, follow the customer, respect regulation from Day 1.
In the “From Burn Rate to Unicorn” discussion, founders and operators talked about what real-world scaling looks like in 2025. It’s not just “grow geography X” and hope. It’s:
Follow the customer into the next market and build the corridor they actually need, even if that’s not the market you originally planned to prioritize.
Win volume by solving a specific pain point (cross-border payments, treasury flow, settlement finality, etc.).
Keep burn under control; don’t spend ahead of validation.
One founder described scaling internationally as essentially co-building with anchor clients, behaving less like a vendor and more like an infrastructure partner. The goal is to grow in step with committed volume rather than gamble on speculative expansion.
Regulation also isn’t something you “bolt on later” anymore. Another founder described being “regulatory first”: only working with regulated exchanges, entering markets where the rules are clear, hiring a head of compliance almost immediately, and taking the licensing pain upfront rather than treating compliance as an afterthought. That approach, while slower at the start, builds long-term credibility with institutions and supervisors, which is now essential in areas like stablecoins, tokenised value transfer, and cross-border payments.
Scaling can still happen through both organic build and acquisition. We heard two playbooks: in some regions, launch from zero and grow fast; in others, buy an existing regulated business (even one that’s undervalued) and integrate it. Both paths work, if you’re disciplined about timing, valuation, and integration.
Hiring impact:
This rewards a very particular leadership profile:
People who can navigate multi-country governance, licensing, and compliance without killing speed.
Builders who are comfortable doing more with a very small headcount.
Operators who understand both M&A integration and greenfield build.
“Hypergrowth generalists who’ll figure it out later” are being replaced by “low-drama operators who can ship in regulated spaces, across borders, under scrutiny.”
Candidate takeaway:
If you’re interviewing for GM / expansion / regulatory / payments roles, expect questions like:
“Which license did you help obtain, in which jurisdiction, and how long did it take?”
“How did you keep operating costs flat while volume scaled?”
“How did you prove product–market fit before we spent millions?”
Bring those answers. That’s what hiring managers (and their boards) are judged on now.
3. Ecosystems are replacing solo players, hubs win by coordinating talent, tech, and policy.
Another repeated theme: no one is scaling alone anymore. In the “FinTech Formula” session, the room talked about how successful hubs are built and why Singapore’s model is still powerful. A few ingredients kept coming up:
Regulatory clarity plus flexibility (e.g. sandboxes) to let new models emerge without immediately shutting them down.
Direct public–private collaboration, where banks, hyperscalers, regulators, and fintech builders actually sit in the same room to solve problems, not posture.
The ability to use Singapore as a regional springboard into Southeast Asia, a fragmented, high-friction, high-opportunity set of markets.
That collaboration is not just philosophy. It’s driving capital allocation decisions: major incumbents are now willing to invest in homegrown fintech infrastructure after co-developing and pressure-testing it with regulators in structured initiatives. That “safe room to build” is part of what keeps Singapore relevant as a launchpad for new digital banking, cross-border payments, and tokenised financial products.
The conversation also looked ahead. The next 10–15 years of fintech won’t just be about mobile, cloud, and APIs (the first wave). It’ll be driven by AI, tokenization, and even early-stage quantum capabilities. Those technologies aren’t just “cool”; they change how market infrastructure, compliance, settlement, and credit work. They also change which jurisdictions become attractive hubs, because some governments are now willing to build regulatory frameworks, or even entirely new regulators, to accelerate those industries and attract scale-ups, not just seed-stage startups.
We also heard something subtle but important: the real gap in many markets is no longer seed funding. It’s Series C and beyond, the scale money that helps companies become regional platforms, not single-market niche players. Hubs that solve that gap (through vision, regulatory support, and late-stage capital) will define the next decade.
Hiring impact:
This ecosystem view changes what “good talent” looks like. Companies don’t just want someone who can optimize one product lane. They want connectors:
People who can work across banks, regulators, payment networks, cloud infra partners, and AI vendors.
People who can translate compliance language to product language to commercial language so deals actually move.
People who understand that in Southeast Asia especially, scale is regional, not domestic.
That’s now considered strategic talent.
Candidate takeaway:
If you’re a mid/senior operator, start telling your story in ecosystem terms:
Who did you align?
Which external partners or regulators did you bring to the table?
How did that unlock a market, license, or client segment?
Being able to coordinate an ecosystem is replacing “I built a feature” as the credibility signal.
4. Talent strategy itself is being rewritten, this decade is human transformation, not just digital transformation.
The skills conversation across “Bridging the Talent Gap” and the skills-focused roundtable was not about hiring more engineers. It was about rethinking what work actually looks like inside financial services. A few striking data points and themes:
Employers expect AI to reduce the absolute number of jobs, 72% said AI will mean fewer roles overall, but at the same time, they believe most roles won’t disappear; they’ll be augmented, with tasks reallocated and redefined.
Six out of ten people in today’s workforce will need to be upskilled by 2030. The speed of change in work design is outpacing how fast education and corporate training can adapt.
Employers can’t just “hire new.” They’re expected to reskill and redeploy the people they already have. One expert called this shift from last decade’s “digital transformation” to this decade’s “human transformation”: designing the AI-enabled professional in every role, not just building new tech.
We also heard how large financial institutions are redesigning work:
Learning is no longer an optional side activity. It’s becoming part of compensation and part of the employee value proposition. If you don’t offer meaningful, applied learning and growth, Gen Z will leave.
Banks are standing up internal talent marketplaces that match people to projects based on skills, not just job titles. That creates “portfolio careers,” lets talent move laterally, and helps the organisation respond faster to new opportunities without always hiring externally.
Organisations are beginning to build and maintain live “skills taxonomies,” mapping which skills they actually have, which ones they’ll need next, and how to move people along that path at scale. This is how companies become genuinely skills-based, not role-based.
There’s also a cultural shift: leaders are being asked to model curiosity, not just mandate it. One bank perspective was that the next generation of talent expects ownership, application, and purpose, not just a PDF training module. And there’s a demand signal to universities and policymakers as well. The ask is no longer “produce finance grads.” It’s “produce people who can blend finance, data, risk judgement, compliance thinking, and AI fluency, and who can operate in SME-heavy, information-light environments where credit decisions are still part art, part science.”
Hiring impact:
For employers in FinTech and financial services, this means:
You’re not just hiring skills. You’re hiring learning agility.
You need leaders who can manage AI-human work models with empathy, guardrails, and accountability.
You’ll be judged on how well you develop people you already have, not just how attractively you recruit from the outside.
Candidate takeaway:
You must show that you can work with AI, prompt it, critique it, govern it, not that you’re afraid it will replace you.
You should be comfortable moving horizontally (projects, interim mandates, internal gigs), not just vertically.
You’ll stand out if you can describe how you solved a real customer pain under regulatory constraints and with limited resources. That’s the new credibility.
So where does this leave us?
The signal from Singapore is unmistakable:
FinTech is moving from burn to profitability. The winners will be the ones who can show disciplined economics early.
Scale is becoming cooperative. Banks, regulators, infrastructure players, and fintech builders are solving problems together, especially in payments, cross-border money movement, tokenization, and SME finance.
Talent is the real moat. Not just scarce talent, adaptive talent. Organisations are actively redesigning work, skills, and leadership models to keep pace.
At Global Fintech Talent, this is exactly the intersection we work in: helping fintechs, banks, and scale-ups identify and attract the leaders who can operate in this new reality, commercially sharp, regulatory fluent, ecosystem-minded, and able to build teams that learn faster than the market changes. Because the next generation of FinTech advantage won’t just be product. It will be people who can turn complexity into momentum.
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