These payments companies are hiring, bucking the trend of tech layoffs

December 23, 2022 10:02 AM

By most measures, 2022 was a difficult year for companies that enable digital payments, resulting in a slew of job losses among technology workers.

There have been more than 90,000 layoffs in the technology sector, according to Crunchbase. That includes challenger banks and digital payment companies, including high-profile firms like Stripe, Brex and Klarna.

"In my personal experience, having lost my job in the past, you learn that you are not infallible," said Charles Rosenblatt, president of PayQuicker, a payment company that supports disbursements. "This helped me become a much more humble employee, which I think is an important quality for both an employee and an employer."

Some of these workers may find their skills in demand, since there are fintechs and legacy card companies that are aggressively adding staff to gain an advantage in the year ahead.

Here are some payment companies and fintechs that have announced large-scale hiring plans.

Discover's Advanced Analytics Resource Center (AARC) in Chicago trains technology workers for specific projects at the financial institution.

Discover

Discover, which reported low charge offs and delinquencies and higher loan growth in the late 2022, has more than two dozen pages of job openings on its site and more than 2,000 postings on LinkedIn.

Discover recently opened a development lab in Chicago called AAR@606. The center focuses on data science, digital payments and other financial technology that supports payment cards. Discover operates a program at the center that matches people with technology or skills to specific initiatives at Discover, including projects that have not yet started.

The institution, which plans to expand the lab in the coming year, is trying to anticipate future needs when hiring rather than recruiting for specific current needs.

Gabby Jones/Bloomberg

Mastercard

Mastercard's job listings literally span the globe, as the card network has hundreds of positions posted on every inhabited continent.

Among Mastercard's projects is a Mastercard in Sustainability Innovation Lab, which recently opened in Stockholm. The lab is charged with finding ways to help the card network's merchants produce, distribute and purchase supplies and services while reducing their carbon footprints. The card network opened the center in support of the EU Green Deal, which aims to make the zone greenhouse-gas neutral by 2050.

Mastercard also plans to hire several hundred staffers with expertise in cryptocurrency and open banking, and has more than 1,500 openings altogether. The card network is additionally expanding its development hub in New York. Like most of the card companies, Mastercard's recent earnings have been strong, and the company for now is monitoring economic conditions more than it is responding to a downturn.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Visa

Visa, which lists more than 600 openings on LinkedIn, is recruiting heavily for business development, data engineering, compliance and product and project management. The company's recent earnings also suggest the company is not noticing a major impact from inflation or economic weakness.

The card brand's recent projects include applying embedded payments to travel booking and transactions, and plans to expand real-time debit payments.

Visa also plans to invest $1 billion in developing payment technology in Africa. Visa recently opened an innovation studio in Kenya, the first hub it has opened in Africa and its sixth globally. The card network also has hubs in Dubai, London, Miami, Singapore and its hometown of San Francisco.

Developers, Visa employees and corporate partners will have access to the lab, which will build new payment technology and digital commerce products. Visa recently partnered with Safaricom to launch a virtual card linked to MPesa, the mobile money service that Safaricom has operated for years to bring digital payments to underserved regions in Africa and elsewhere.

American Express

American Express listed more than 600 job openings as of late December, including numerous positions for software engineers, data managers, compliance experts and recruiters to improve hiring for diversity, equity and inclusion. That's on top of the more than 3,600 people Amex hired already in 2022.

Amex, which reported strong earnings and has forecasted continued growth in payment revenue, is working to improve its ability to connect with fintechs to issue its cards. Amex is also expanding its B2B payments technology through a dedicated payments ecosystem and through general product development.

In an earlier interview, Luke Gebb, executive vice president of Amex Digital Labs, said, "Our earnings are good so it allows us to be aggressive at this moment."

Wise

Wise, formerly known as TransferWise, is accelerating its expansion into North America, where its revenue in the past year has expanded by about 57%. Wise currently has 4,300 employees in 18 global offices, up from about 3,000 at the start of 2020, and it is hiring 250 employees in 2023 in New York, Tampa and Austin.

These hires will support products such as automated conversions, which allow businesses to automatically change currencies when a desired exchange rate is met, and improvements in how businesses view unpaid bills in Quickbooks and pay directly from a Wise account. Wise is also adding more financial services to its core remittance business as it attempts to build a financial super app.

"It's a good time now for us to invest in our business and luckily it's gotten easier to hire," said Harsh Sinha, chief technology officer at Wise, in an earlier interview.

Adyen

The Dutch payment processor has about 300 job openings listed on its site, including jobs that require skills in managing payments data, software engineering, product management and technology recruitment.

Adyen's technology initiatives include expanding deployments for point of sale technology products as the company looks to compete to win merchants away from traditional acquirers and other payment technology companies. A new product called NYC1 allows small businesses to offer payments in their own point of sale app; while AMS1 provides the same technology for larger companies.

Adyen is also deploying Apple's Tap to Pay, which allows businesses to use iPhones to accept contactless payments.

Curve

Curve, a U.K.-based fintech that supports an all-in-one payment card, is in the midst of a U.S. expansion. The company is in the process of adding about 70 people globally and about a dozen in the U.S.

"Right now is a great time to pick up talent," said Amanda Orson, Curve's U.S. CEO, noting the supply of thousands of available technology workers. "There is a greater supply of available talent than we've seen since the start of the pandemic," Orson said.

The "return to work" trend also contributes to the available pool, Orson said, adding some talent is less eager to return to the office and are persuadable for the right opportunity. "Curve U.S., as a flexible-first employer, has been the beneficiary of talent that values the ability to direct where they work from, first."

PayQuicker

Some smaller payment technology firms are also expanding. The Rochester, N.Y.-based PayQuicker specializes in disbursements for clients such as gig economy employers, giving the company a track to find clients as payroll patterns change due to an increase in contract work. It also has attracted clients in the gaming and insurance industries.

The company's platform provides access to payments through its insured PayQuicker-issued bank accounts.

PayQuicker, which was founded in 2007, has about 60 employees and plans to expand its team by about 20% in 2023. PayQuicker recently partnered with Mastercard to support client-branded virtual and physical cards, secured bank accounts and mobile wallets.

"We would love to add some of the talented individuals out there," said Charles Rosenblatt, president of PayQuicker. "Those impacted by the layoffs and currently seeking attractive opportunities."

Stax

Stax, which often hires from outside of the payments industry to draw in new perspectives, plans to expand its staff of about 300 in the next year.

"We continue to see growth in profitable revenue and opportunistic time to invest in the growth of the business as we have historically thrived in uncertain times," said Sal Rehmetullah, president of Stax.

Rehmetullah co-founded Stax with his sister, Suneera Madhani, in 2014. The company, which was previously called Fattmerchant, offers payment processing and other technology for businesses on a subscription basis, an alternative pricing model that Madhani's more traditional employer rejected before Madhani helped create Stax.

That model, as well as a focus on enabling employees to focus on projects outside of their core skill sets, helped the company survive the pandemic, and it's set to use that strategy again for any economic headwinds it faces in 2023.