"Whenever we hired tech talent with payments or Fintech experience, they would charge us a premium. Where as you go to India and you have Mastercard, Visa, many of the European Banks and many international Fintech giants with large development teams. The reality is we can offer clients people with 10-15 years experience at Mastercard at a fraction of the cost."
Simon Lee - Patona
Tier One People has partnered with Patona Technologies to offer an affordable tech talent solution, helping Fintech scale not fail. Patona provides highly experienced and skilled tech talent at a fraction of the cost associated with hiring in Australia.
Starting life as a bootstrapped startup, Patona saw amazing success by running the majority of its business from India with minimal investment. Patona now has over 100 staff developing, supporting and scaling Fintech across Australia.
Tier One People is proud to partner with Patona, helping our clients scale affordably. At such a mission-critical time for the industry, we feel cutting costs is essential to keep Fintech innovation alive in Australia.
Managing Partner at Patona is Simon Lee, Co-Founder of Assembly Payments. Simon has built several tech companies and has raised over $70m during his time as a founder. Dexter Cousins interviewed Simon for the FinTech Australia Podcast recently.
"When I was running Assembly, if we hired tech talent with Fintech experience, they would charge us a premium. You go to India and there's Mastercard, Visa, many of the European Banks and many international Fintech giants. All of them with large development teams of highly skilled and educated people. The reality is Patona offers clients talent with 10-15 years experience at Mastercard at a fraction of the cost for someone in Australia with 3 years experience. The talent we have working for us at Patona have built apps and platforms at scale, several times over."
Tier One People and Patona share the same values and vision for Fintech in Australia. We want to see Fintech scale, not fail.
A Fintech leaders no1 challenge is people and the unsustainable salaries demanded by Mid-Snr level tech talent. Candidates with a few years experience demand higher salaries than a founder. Even if a startup can hire overseas talent, people quickly raise their salary expectations once they have minimal experience in the local market.
As an example, we approached a senior architect who wanted $250,000 pa to leave their current role, 12 months ago they wanted $120,000. We don't believe offering skilled migrant Visas is a viable solution right now due to COVID. And we question if it is a long term solution, especially when we see remote working so well for all of our clients.
What Fintech founders in Australia have achieved so far is nothing short of remarkable given the challenges and costs of securing highly experienced tech talent. We believe that by utilising high quality, highly experienced, low-cost outsourced tech talent more Fintech jobs will be created onshore. Put simply we expect this solution will see more Fintech's scale and fewer Fintech's fail.
Australian entrepreneurs are not short of ideas, attitude, drive or intelligence. But they do face tougher challenges around access to talent, capital and local economics that make success more difficult to attain than their UK or US counterparts.
Enabling founders to focus on execution and not on raising capital should result in an increase of early-stage Fintech scaling and building sustainable businesses. Without the need to keep raising equity and diluting their ownership.
Tier One People has tried many different service models and pricing structures to make hiring developers and tech talent more affordable. But we simply can not come up with a better, more affordable recruitment solution than Patona. It makes perfect sense for us to partner with them and offer our clients a much faster and affordable path to growth.
To discuss how we can help you scale affordably .....
