Endeavor

1 3 Access to talent ranked similarly high among the challenges that founders mentioned. 1. Non-financial talent and senior executive positions are hard to fill in fintech. There are about 70,000 financial services professionals working in Milan, but interviewees reported that other types of talent are hard to find. When asked about the hardest positions to hire for, over 70 percent of respondents brought up non-finance related positions, with the most prominent hiring issues related to marketing and data science. High-growth entrepreneurs particularly struggled to find the right senior executives or business development experts: about 40 percent of them brought this problem up. 2. Milan founders are competing for talent with tech companies across Europe. With a fluid workforce willing to move abroad (28,000 graduates left the country in 2017 alone), Italian companies have to compete for talent with tech companies all across Europe. When fintech founders are trying to scale in Milan, the companies they compete with for tech talent and managerial talent are success stories like Cabify and Glovo and American tech companies like Uber, Netflix, and Tesla which established European headquarters in Amsterdam. 17 Companies with sufficient budget have chances to win this game and some are even succeeding in targeting the former employees of other European companies. These types of challenges vary widely by business model, as illustrated by the chart on the following page: consumer- facing companies were over 30 percent more likely to report challenges related to hiring qualified managers as other companies than others, while business- to-business founders were more likely to struggle with regulatory challenges- CHALLENGE 2 ACCESS TO NON-FINANCIAL TALENT

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