Defining the Scope: Segments Included (and Excluded) in Manning & Company’s FinTech Practice

At Manning & Company, our FinTech practice focuses on delivering top talent to leading companies disrupting and enabling financial services. But “FinTech” encompasses a vast landscape of subsectors – so how do we define our coverage area?

We take a focused approach, targeting FinTech companies whose solutions directly enable banking, payments, lending, investments and insurance. However, we made deliberate choices to exclude certain adjacent segments from our core practice.

Here are the key segments we excluded, and why:

Crypto – We believe crypto/blockchain represents an emerging domain warranting its own dedicated expertise. The market landscape, user base, regulatory issues and talent dynamics differ greatly from traditional FinTech.

Insurance Tech – InsurTech has grown into its own robust ecosystem overlapping with FinTech. We felt it was better served by specialist teams rather than grouping it under our broad FinTech coverage.

Healthcare FinTech – We view healthcare as a distinct industry with highly specialized needs around technology, compliance, workflows and more. Thus, we exclude medical/healthcare payments and lending solutions from our FinTech practice.

CFO Stack – This includes financial planning, accounting and analytics tools. We excluded it because our perspective has evolved. We now see “CFO stack” as table stakes capabilities that forward-thinking CFOs are building within their own finance organizations, often leveraging FinTech solutions.

In essence, we filter out segments that warrant their own dedicated practices or operate too peripherally to core financial services. This allows us to focus our FinTech practice on domains directly transforming banking, payments, lending, investments and insurance:

Mobile banking and engagement solutions

Payments technologies and infrastructure

Alternative lending platforms and tools

Investment management and trading systems

Risk, compliance and cybersecurity solutions

Embedded fintech providers enabling financial institutions

Data, analytics and decisioning capabilities

Back-end processing automation and modernization

However, while we excluded “CFO stack” as its own standalone category, we very much include such capabilities within our FinTech focus – because enterprises across banking, insurance and more require that talent.

We believe the most innovative financial services institutions are essentially building their own fintech by embedding such solutions internally. Hiring talent to do this well is a priority, and an area where we can provide immense value.

In summary, Manning & Company deliberately defined our FinTech practice to focus on our core competencies. We specialize in the talent transforming banking and financial services companies. Crypto, InsurTech and health require their own lenses, while CFO stack has evolved from a standalone “vertical” into table stakes capability.

This considered perspective allows us to deliver maximum impact for clients hiring critical FinTech talent. As the market evolves, so too will our areas of focus.