10 top recruiters to know if you want to land a job in fintech at firms like Robinhood, Coinbase, and Square
Will Brewster, Daversa Partners
Daversa
Key placements: Varo, Stash
A director at Daversa, Will Brewster joined the firm in 2013 after starting his career at BNY Mellon within its global collateral services division, according to his LinkedIn. He now leads searches for Daversa’s fintech vertical across digital banking, payments, blockchain tech and lending, and financial infrastructure and security.
Brewster ran the executive team build outs for two fast-growing fintechs — challenger bank Varo and personal finance app Stash — and has successfully completed more than 100 executive searches, mostly across fintechs.
Brewster’s searches have included work for buy-now, pay-later giant Affirm, Goldman Sachs’ Marcus, Capitolis, Chainalysis, Bitcoin payment startup BitPay, and Bread.
And on the VC side, Brewster has worked with Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Valar Ventures, Canapi Ventures, Sequoia, and Spark Capital.
Scott Fletcher, Intersection Growth Partners
Scott Fletcher
Key placements: Coinbase, Anchorage
Intersection Growth Partner’s Scott Fletcher began his career in traditional financial services, working in equity trading and then at a trading-technology firm before making the switch to fintech recruiting. Having a presence in both worlds has been a key value-add as the search firm places clients, he told Insider.
To date, Intersection Growth Partners has placed 10 executive-level hires at crypto exchange Coinbase, and also counts among its clients digital-asset platform Anchorage, payments startup Circle, and venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz.
Fletcher’s earliest interaction with Anchorage, he said, involved taking a leap of faith. He agreed to do a search for the startup on a contingent basis when Intersection Growth Partners was first breaking into the fintech space. That specific search didn’t work out, but Fletcher has since placed the crypto company’s head of finance and head of sales.
“It was still the best search in my life because we created a great relationship with these guys,” Fletcher told Insider.
Intersection Growth Partners also frequently invests in the companies for whom it conducts searches.
“We really, truly like to be partners with our clients and not transactionally-focused head hunters,” Fletcher said.
Jake Flohr, V3 Talent Partners
Jake Flohr
Key placements: Upstart, Dave
Jake Flohr is the cofounder and COO of V3 Talent Partners where he works alongside CEO Jason Van Voorhis, who founded the firm in 2018 after leading engineering recruiting at Snap.
To date, Flohr’s successful placements have included the head of financial planning and analysis at consumer-lending company Upstart.
Based in southern California, Flohr and Van Voorhis told Insider V3’s typical approach is to work with venture firms like Index Ventures, Lightspeed, and Sequoia Capital to serve as an “interim head of talent” and scale hiring at young companies that are past their seed stage.
After seven years as an account executive at Rockwell Automation and OSIsoft, Flohr’s work at V3 so far has seen him lead searches across engineering, product, human resources, marketing, and finance roles, where he’s found a natural fit in the fintech world.
“I was a mechanical engineer through school. I view the world in that lens,” Flohr said.
Some of his earliest placements were for the banking-app-turned-unicorn Dave, where Flohr served as the de-facto head of talent as the company scaled across fundraising rounds and grew from having 23 employees to more than a hundred.
Danielle Greenberg, Glocap Search
Glocap
Key placements: Did not disclose
Founded in 1997 and with offices in New York and San Francisco, Glocap has typically focused on more traditional areas of finance across investment banking, asset managers, private equity, and venture capital compared to some of the other firms on this list.
But Glocap is an example of a recruiting firm that, recognizing the growing impact of fintech across broad sectors of finance, is looking to make its own mark on the space.
Danielle Greenberg, a managing director overseeing Glocap’s portfolio manager and asset management recruiting practice, told Insider she’s seeing more and more interest from existing and potential clients for fintech roles.
“As we work a lot with venture firms, more and more younger venture firms are popping up with a focus in fintech,” Greenberg said.
While Glocap hasn’t launched a dedicated fintech practice at this point and has been mainly relying on inbound interest, Greenberg said “we are really starting to think strategically about how we create more of a potential business focus in this area.” Greenberg said her fintech work has been alongside Amy Zises, a managing director at Glocap who heads the firm’s real-estate practice.
Glocap has particularly seen interest within the cryptocurrency sphere, even from existing clients whose bread and butter hasn’t always been working with digital currencies.
“Some of the more traditional hedge funds that we partner with are starting to get very active in the digital assets space,” and Greenberg has also seen interest in crypto from those in trading roles and senior executives across Wall Street.
Alex Lebow, Daversa
Daversa
Key placements: Brex, Hippo
Alex Lebow is a partner at Daversa Partners, based in Los Angeles. Since joining the firm in 2009, Lebow has worked with VCs such as Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit, and NEA.
“I have been at Daversa for more than 10 years and during that time I think we have helped build a lot of the world’s most disruptive fintech companies, as this category has emerged as one of the most exciting in tech,” Lebow told Insider via email.
Lebow has placed execs at fintechs like Brex (COO, CMO, general counsel), C2FO (CPO, VP product management, VP partnerships), Current (CFO, general counsel), and Hippo (CMO, CIO, VP engineering, director of analytics, director of IT, and director of data engineering).
Dean Nacey, SPMB
SPMB
Key placements: NerdWallet, Juniper Square.
Based in San Francisco, SPMB’s practices range across sectors within fintech.
The executive search firm’s clients include Robinhood, BlueVine, Credit Karma, Nerdwallet, Affirm, Chime, Metromile, and Juniper Square, to name a few.
A partner at SPMB, Dean Nacey’s areas of focus include searches for board of directors, CEOs, and people in human resources roles.
Nacey has filled board of director, C-suite, and top HR roles at personal-finance app NerdWallet, and C-suite, HR, and business strategy executive roles at investment software Juniper Square.
Primarily working with enterprise and consumer-tech companies across public corporations, venture capital, and private-equity backed startups, Nacey leads the firm’s fintech practice alongside Dave Mullarkey, who has placed top executives at BlueVine, and Steve Popper, who has successfully conducted searches for NerdWallet and Affirm.
Jonathan Pomeranz, True Search
True Search
Key placements: Green Dot, Acorns
A partner at True Search, Jonathan Pomeranz heads the firm’s fintech, banking, and payments practice in the US.
True’s recent placements include the CEO of Green Dot Bank, the chief marketing officer of Acorns, and some of the top executives working at consumer goods fintech CircleUp.
The firm’s roster of clients ranges from Albert to eToro and Northwestern Mutual.
Based in New York, Pomeranz worked on executive services across financial services at Korn Ferry prior to joining True. Pomeranz also worked in investment management at Park Avenue Securities.
Evan Pollock, Objective Paradigm
Objective Paradigm
Key placements: Did not disclose.
Evan Pollock is head of the fintech practice at Objective Paradigm, a search firm that was founded by his brother, Ryan Pollock, in 1999.
Objective Paradigm counts decades-long relationships with proprietary trading firms like DRW Trading, Jump Trading, and IMC Markets, and typically focuses on small to medium-sized companies that the search firm can partner and grow with. Objective Paradigm has also been building out a dedicated digital assets and blockchain practice as the space grows.
“Our niche is just identifying the best talent in the market and aligning it with the firms that are the most selective,” Pollock told Insider.
Based in Chicago, Pollock said a key part of their business revolves around being able to place candidates from across the country in finance firms in New York. Pollock’s focus is typically on the most in-demand software roles across Wall Street, encompassing software development, data engineering, and quantitative research roles.
Objective Paradigm’s searches and placements range from entry-level engineers up to C-level roles like chief technology officers.
“Just from being in the network, you follow your placements, you keep in touch with them and they mature and start moving up the ladder. And I think that that’s part of the reason that we’re getting these searches at such a high level,” Pollock said.
Jim Urquhart, Bowdoin Group
Courtesy of Jim Urquhart
Key placements: Bento for Business, SoFi
Jim Urquhart is a managing director working with fintech clients for the executive search firm Bowdoin Group.
With 15 years of experience, Urquhart oversees Bowdoin’s fintech practice, which includes companies in the regtech, insurtech, payments, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and digital lending spaces. Urquhart recruits for c-suite roles, go-to-market leaders, HR, sales and marketing, and product execs.
He’s placed leaders at fintechs including Bento for Business, Dealogic, and SoFi.
Urquhart joined Bowdoin in 2006, shortly after graduating from the University of New Hampshire.
Deepali Vyas, Korn Ferry
Korn Ferry
Key placements: PayPal, Square
Deepali Vyas is the global co-head of fintech at Korn Ferry, an international consulting and recruiting firm.
Based in New York, Vyas has worked with fintechs including Coinbase, Gemini, PayPal, Square, and Stripe. She focuses on c-suite and board hiring, and advises clients on organizational design and talent assessment.
Vyas joined Korn Ferry in 2018, and previously led global markets and hedge fund recruiting at Heidrick & Struggles. She was also the founder and CEO of VnV Partners, an executive search firm focused on financial services from 2009 to 2014.
Published at Thu, 02 Sep 2021 11:47:04 -0400