Philippine fintech hiring has slowed over the past year. For many, the shift has appeared mainly through headlines — funding winters, layoffs, and hiring freezes.
Inside companies, however, the change has been far quieter.
Across fintech teams, work has expanded rather than disappeared. Responsibilities once handled by separate functions — documentation, internal systems, basic security checks, and operational fixes—have gradually accumulated within existing roles. Not through formal restructuring, but through attrition and unfilled positions. Teams remained lean. Hiring stayed paused. The work continued.
This experience is not unique. Across the Philippine fintech sector, the slowdown has been less about sudden cuts and more about subtle, structural change.
A slowdown without mass layoffs
Unlike earlier tech downturns, fintech firms in the Philippines have largely avoided highly publicized, large-scale layoffs. Instead, many turned to quieter controls: hiring freezes, delayed openings, and internal role consolidation — patterns that now define much of Philippine fintech hiring.
When employees moved on, positions were often left unfilled. “Temporary” freezes stretched into quarters. Teams absorbed responsibilities once assigned to specialists. Job titles stayed the same, but expectations expanded.
This was not necessarily a sign of mismanagement. For fintech firms closer to profitability than growth-at-all-costs, it was a defensive response. Capital became more expensive. Regulatory scrutiny increased. Risk tolerance declined.
The result was a clear shift from expansion to efficiency in Philippine fintech hiring decisions.
Which roles slowed down first
The slowdown did not affect all roles equally.
Generalist growth roles were often the first to pause. Pure frontend positions, manual QA roles, and non-technical product or UX roles became harder to justify unless they were directly tied to revenue, compliance, or operational risk.
Junior roles also thinned out, as companies favored smaller teams with higher experience density—another visible trend in Philippine fintech hiring.
In practice, this meant fewer single-scope hires. Companies increasingly looked for professionals who could operate across domains — or at least understand how their work fit into a larger system.
Growth-focused hiring slowed. Risk-focused hiring did not.
Why cybersecurity demand never really went away
While some roles stalled, cybersecurity remained a consistent priority.
Security work is difficult to defer. Audits do not pause for hiring freezes. Regulators do not relax requirements because teams are leaner. Breaches, if anything, become more damaging when staffing is tight.
As a result, fintech firms continued to invest — selectively — in security roles. These were not flashy positions, but practical ones: application security, cloud security, identity and access management, logging, and incident response.
This demand was not driven by optimism. It was driven by necessity—and it remains one of the more resilient segments of Philippine fintech hiring.
AI hiring, but with a very different focus
AI is another area where demand persisted, though in a more restrained form than headlines might suggest.
Fintech companies are not hiring AI talent to experiment. They are hiring to reduce manual work they can no longer staff. The most in-demand skills are tied to operational use cases: fraud detection, risk scoring, workflow automation, and internal tooling.
These are not research roles. They are applied, production-focused positions designed to help smaller teams handle larger workloads — reflecting how Philippine fintech hiring has become more selective and outcome-driven.
Reskilling is happening — quietly and unevenly
Reskilling is often discussed, but on the ground it looks less like formal programs and more like necessity-driven learning.
Many tech workers are expanding into security, automation, data handling, or infrastructure not because it aligns with a long-term career plan, but because their roles now require it. Learning happens after hours, on personal time, often without immediate title changes or compensation adjustments.
Some companies support this shift. Many do not. The gap between rising expectations and limited institutional support has become one of the more uncomfortable realities shaping Philippine fintech hiring today.
What this shift says about Philippine fintech
Taken together, these patterns suggest that Philippine fintech is not shrinking—but tightening.
The sector has entered a more mature phase, where risk management, regulatory alignment, and operational resilience matter as much as user growth. Hiring has not disappeared; it has become more selective. The bar has not lowered—it has narrowed.
For tech workers navigating Philippine fintech hiring, depth increasingly matters more than breadth. Understanding systems, risk, and real-world constraints now carries more weight than chasing the latest framework.
For founders, the shift is a reminder that role consolidation has limits. Lean teams can move quickly, but they also carry hidden costs—burnout, fragility, and security blind spots.
The slowdown may feel uncomfortable, especially from the inside. But it also signals a reset—one that favors resilience over rapid expansion. In fintech, that shift may ultimately be a sign of the industry growing up, not slowing down.
Sources:
Philippine tech workforce is shifting toward AI and digital skills
- AI learning is growing rapidly among Filipino workers, with a big rise in enrollments for AI-related courses — sometimes 9× year-on-year — showing increasing interest in AI skills.
- A 2024 Microsoft report found AI skills are a top priority for Filipino recruitment managers and many employers prefer applicants with AI proficiency.
Skills gaps exist in tech, including cybersecurity and AI
- A Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Economic Newsletter notes a shortage of skilled professionals in areas like AI and cybersecurity among the IT-BPM sector in the Philippines.
- Local recruiting reports (e.g., A7 Recruitment) list cybersecurity specialists and AI/Machine Learning engineers among the top roles in demand in Philippine fintech by 2025.
