Accounting and finance operations at scale, with a large annual output of certified public accountants and extensive experience with international reporting standards.
Compliance, anti money laundering and know your customer operations, which have been performed for international institutions from the Philippines for a long time.
Risk and internal audit, controls testing, and reconciliation work.
Customer operations for financial products, including disputes, servicing and collections.
Engineering for financial systems, including integration and payments work, though this competes with the general software market for the same people.
Market Guides
Hiring in the Philippines for fintech and financial services companies
In short
The Philippines has an unusually deep pool for financial services roles, built on a large qualified accountant population and decades of experience supporting international financial institutions. The considerations specific to fintech are data handling, background verification standards, and the fact that regulatory knowledge is jurisdiction specific and rarely transfers.
Financial services is one of the sectors where the Philippine talent pool is genuinely deep rather than merely adequate, and one where the requirements around a hire are heavier than the hire itself. This is an illustrative overview of what tends to matter.
Where the depth is
What does not transfer, and it matters
Regulatory knowledge is jurisdiction specific. Someone with deep experience of Philippine banking regulation does not thereby understand the requirements of your home regulator, and the reverse is also true.
What does transfer is the discipline: control mindset, documentation habits, evidence standards and the instinct that a process needs to be auditable. That is the durable part and it is present in this market in volume.
The practical consequence is to hire for the discipline and plan to teach the jurisdiction, rather than searching for a rare candidate who already knows your regulator.
What does transfer is the discipline: control mindset, documentation habits, evidence standards and the instinct that a process needs to be auditable. That is the durable part and it is present in this market in volume.
The practical consequence is to hire for the discipline and plan to teach the jurisdiction, rather than searching for a rare candidate who already knows your regulator.
Data handling, which is the real constraint
Fintech hiring is usually gated on data access rather than on talent.
The Philippines has its own data protection regime under the Data Privacy Act, with a supervising authority and obligations on organisations handling personal information. Where your customers are elsewhere, your home obligations, including GDPR where relevant, continue to apply to the data regardless of where the person processing it sits.
Practically this means deciding early what a Philippine based person may see. Many companies structure roles around tokenised or restricted access rather than making it an all or nothing question, which widens what can be hired without widening exposure.
The Philippines has its own data protection regime under the Data Privacy Act, with a supervising authority and obligations on organisations handling personal information. Where your customers are elsewhere, your home obligations, including GDPR where relevant, continue to apply to the data regardless of where the person processing it sits.
Practically this means deciding early what a Philippine based person may see. Many companies structure roles around tokenised or restricted access rather than making it an all or nothing question, which widens what can be hired without widening exposure.
Background verification
Financial services hiring typically carries a higher verification standard, and this is one of the areas where a foreign employer is most exposed to not knowing the local landscape.
Employment verification, identity confirmation and criminal record checks all exist and work in the Philippines. What varies is which employers respond, what a given document actually proves, and which patterns of misrepresentation recur locally.
Build the verification stage into the timeline rather than treating it as a formality at the end. It is the stage where problems that would otherwise surface at month 6 become visible in week 3.
Employment verification, identity confirmation and criminal record checks all exist and work in the Philippines. What varies is which employers respond, what a given document actually proves, and which patterns of misrepresentation recur locally.
Build the verification stage into the timeline rather than treating it as a formality at the end. It is the stage where problems that would otherwise surface at month 6 become visible in week 3.
What to plan for
A longer process than for a general software hire, driven by verification rather than by scarcity.
Statutory employer costs of roughly 11 to 16 percent depending on seniority, falling as salary rises because the main contributions cap out.
A decision on data access before the job description, because it determines which candidates are even relevant.
And advice from your own compliance function on whether the arrangement changes anything for your regulator, which is a question worth asking before the first hire rather than after the fifth.
Statutory employer costs of roughly 11 to 16 percent depending on seniority, falling as salary rises because the main contributions cap out.
A decision on data access before the job description, because it determines which candidates are even relevant.
And advice from your own compliance function on whether the arrangement changes anything for your regulator, which is a question worth asking before the first hire rather than after the fifth.
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