In the last nine months, AI has stolen fintech’s crown as the most popular (and most hyped-up) European tech sector.
So, true to brand, the neobanks and payments companies have been quick to adapt. From upgrading customer services to detecting fraud, the sector is investing big time into the efficiency-enhancing potential that machine learning buffs say AI will deliver. Time will tell whether these investments pay off.
Sifted contacted the top 20 most valuable fintech unicorns to find out about their AI hiring plans. Fourteen said they’re using AI — mostly to detect and reduce fraud and money laundering — and 12 said they’re currently hiring for at least one AI role. These jobs command salaries of up to £140k base pay, according to Glassdoor reviews.
But we’re still in the early days of fintechs hiring AI talent: the jobs boards Sifted contacted for this piece said they expect to have enough data to work out the most common AI roles fintechs are hiring for and average salaries for those positions in around six months time.
Here are the European fintech unicorns that are already investing in AI talent, ranked by their number of open roles.
1. SumUp
Open AI roles: 10
What roles? Data analysts, data engineers and data scientists
Current size of AI team: 25
Current size of workforce: 3,300, according to LinkedIn
Salary range: Not disclosed
Uses: A spokesperson for SumUp told Sifted that the majority of its data scientists work in Risk and Compliance, where the payments company uses AI to tackle and investigate fraud, monitor for money laundering and perform risk assessments.
- SumUp also says it uses machine learning for merchant support, churn prediction, lead scoring and some other advanced analytics.
- In terms of generative AI, SumUp says its developers are using tools like GitHub Copilot and it browses internal documentation with a genAI assistant. It also has a live ‘smart search’ for its merchants using Azure’s GDPR-compliant OpenAI foundational models.
- SumUp is also working on developing advanced chatbots and AI-assisted suspicious report generation and merchant onboarding, the spokesperson said.
2. Revolut
Open AI roles: 7
What roles? 7 data scientists
Current size of AI team: 300
Current size of workforce: Over 6,000, according to company spokesperson
Salary range: Not disclosed. Average Revolut machine learning engineer salary in the UK is £79,989, according to Glassdoor
Uses: A spokesperson for Revolut said the company has several data science and machine learning teams across the business, including:
- Fincrime Data Science, which “creates models to safeguard customers against fraudulent activities and prevent onboarding of users with criminal purposes”;
- Computer Vision Engineers, who “detect fake selfies and documents which are critical to combat fraud,” in particular targeting fraudsters who use generative AI models themselves;
- Credit and Risk Data Science, which develops models for assessing risks such as credit failures and investment risks coming from its investment offerings.
3. Monzo
Open AI roles: 7 across the data team, according to website
What roles? Data analysts, data engineers and data scientists
Current size of AI team: Company declined to comment
Current size of workforce: Over 3,000, according to a company spokesperson
Salary range: Up to £140k for a data scientist at Monzo, according to Glassdoor
Uses: Company declined to comment. Monzo is using machine learning to predict “outcomes related to customer experience and auto-complete search queries,” according to a company blog post.
4. Starling
Open AI roles: Company has not yet responded
What roles? Data analysts, data engineers and data scientists
Current size of AI team: No current dedicated team, but AI supports many technology and operations roles
Current size of workforce: More than 2,800 employees, according to company spokesperson
Salary range: Undisclosed
Uses: “Machine learning, AI and data science support key functions across the bank, such as fraud detection and customer onboarding," a spokesperson for Starling told Sifted.
Starling’s data science team currently works on a number of applications across its account application process and in-app features, according to its website.
5. Qonto
Open AI roles: 1, according to company website
What roles? Machine learning engineer
Current size of AI team: Company has not yet responded
Current size of workforce: 1,300, according to company website
Salary range: Undisclosed
Uses: According to the open job advert on Qonto’s website, the company currently has around 10 machine learning models in production and would “like to expand further and improve their performance.”
The job ad predominantly describes the company’s use of machine learning as for anti-risk, anti-money laundering and fraud detection purposes. It’s also working on “automating the matching of inbound transactions with generated invoices” so that its business customers “get a clear view of their finances and prepare the work for their accountants,” the job advert says.
6. Zepz
Open AI roles: 2
What roles? Machine learning engineer and lead data scientist
Current size of AI team: "A few dozen," according to company spokesperson
Current size of workforce: c.1,200, post-layoffs, according to numbers before May 2023 layoffs
Salary range: Not disclosed
Uses: Zepz is using machine learning models for fraud detection, time series prediction of financial data and churn prediction, according to the live job advert.
The company says its current tech stack includes Airflow, Fivetran, DBT, BigQuery and BigTable and is primarily in Python.
A spokesperson for the company said: "We use machine learning to determine fraudulent vs. legitimate users. We use large language models to increase speed on initial customer care interactions to help resolve simple issues. Additionally, we take learnings on demographic modeling to aid in our various marketing initiatives. "
7. OakNorth
Open AI roles: 6, in data science team
What roles? Full stack data analysts, senior data analysts, senior analytics engineers and data engineers
Current size of AI team: “Several dozen”
Current size of workforce: 146, according to latest annual report
Salary range: Dependent on experience
Uses:
- A spokesperson for the company told Sifted that OakNorth currently uses AI and ML models for the beginning of its interactions with customers (including data extraction and mapping borrower data);
- For scenario analysis and monitoring (including industry forecasting and benchmarking features, using feedback loop learning models and predictive analytics);
- And for risk assessment across its loan portfolio.
8. Mollie
Open AI roles: 1
What roles? Machine learning engineer
Current size of AI team: Company not yet responded
Current size of workforce: Over 700, according to company website
Salary range: Not disclosed
Uses: Company has not yet responded.
When speaking to Sifted in a recent interview, Mollie founder Adriaan Mol was bullish on recent advancements in the technology.
“I think we’re not super far away from having a prompt where you can just ask: ‘Build this SaaS company for HR that solves this problem’, and AI will code the whole stack for you and host it for you,” he said.
“We’ll also enter a new age where the economics will completely change. Revenue per customer will increase with AI but so will productivity — you’ll be able to build larger companies while being smaller.”
9. Checkout.com
Open AI roles: 1
What roles? Machine learning engineer
Current size of AI team: Company not yet responded
Current size of workforce: Over 1,700, according to company website
Salary range: Not disclosed. The company pays up to £110k a year for a machine learning engineer, according to Glassdoor
Uses: Company did not respond. According to the live job advert, the role will focus on fraud detection, developing machine learning systems for “providing near-real-time transaction fraud predictions” for the payments company's merchants.
10. N26
Open AI roles: 1
What roles? AMR modeller
Current size of AI team: Company not yet responded
Current size of workforce: Over 1,500, according to company website
Salary range: Not disclosed
Uses: A company spokesperson highlighted banking security as an area that the neobank is concentrating on with its AI development:
- The spokesperson said N26’s ML-powered fraud probability models detect suspicious customers and behaviors. “The technology flags concerns to trained personnel to take appropriate action, which has ultimately led to a significant reduction in cases of fraud and money laundering on our platform,” they said;
- According to the live job advert, N26 is on the hunt for an AMR (analytics, reporting and modelling) hire to join its transaction monitoring team, using machine learning models to detect money laundering, terrorism financing, fraud and sanctions risk.
11. Klarna
Open AI roles: 1
What roles? Data scientist
Current size of AI team: Company declined to comment
Current size of workforce: Over 5,000, according to company website
Salary range: Not disclosed
Uses: Klarna declined to comment to Sifted on its use of AI, but it’s not been so shy in touting its uses of the tech in the past. In particular, it announced its launch of an “AI-powered product recommendation engine” in April, as part of its transition into an all-in-one shopping app. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recently told Semafor that he thinks the future of shopping will include “a combination of hyper-personalization based on users’ unique preferences, AI-shopping assistants, and content creators that connect people and products through entertaining experiences.”
The advertised job advert seems more geared towards its legacy credit financing product, as it’s looking for a data scientist with experience in risk management for its pay later, financing and card products.
12. Trade Republic
Open AI roles: 1
What roles? Senior data engineer
Current size of AI team: Company did not respond to request for comment
Current size of workforce: 750 employees, according to LinkedIn
Salary range: Not disclosed
Uses: Trade Republic’s job advert says it has a data platform, but does not provide detail on what functions in the business it’s developing ML models for.
13. Wefox
Open AI roles: 0
What roles? N/A
Current size of AI team: 25, of which around 10 are data scientists or machine learning engineers
Current size of workforce: Company recently did unannounced layoffs of an undisclosed amount. According to LinkedIn, it has 914 employees
Salary range: Not disclosed
Uses: A spokesperson for the insurtech said the company’s machine learning team is developing models to help insurance brokers be more productive. No more details were provided.
14. GoCardless
Open AI roles: 0
What roles? N/A
Current size of AI team: Around 10, according to company spokesperson
Current size of workforce: 868 employees, according to LinkedIn
Salary range: Not disclosed
Uses: A spokesperson for the payments company told Sifted it’s currently using machine learning for its “GoCardless Success+” feature — a product that helps businesses to improve their payment retries.
“It uses data to help a merchant predict the best day to retry a payment that fails,” the spokesperson said. “We launched it c.2.5 years ago and since then we've found that it recovers, on average, 70% of payments that initially fail.”
"GoCardless also uses machine learning for Protect+, a tool that uses data from the millions of payments processed on its global bank payment network to identify and prevent fraud."
