33 of 40 funded Australian fintechs we tracked made a second finance hire, a median 15 months after the first. Fintech then builds the largest finance teams in the study: 26 of 40 have made five or more finance hires.
The fintech hiring ladder
Once a fintech has one finance person, the second tends to follow within about a year and a quarter, and every later step is shorter than that first one. The table shows the median gap at each step, for the fintechs that took it.
| Step | Median months | Fintechs (n) | All startups, median (n) |
|---|---|---|---|
| First to second hire | 15 (middle half 5 to 27) | 33 | 16 (156) |
| Second to third | 9 | 30 | 11 (120) |
| Third to fourth | 11 | 30 | 8 (107) |
| Fourth to fifth | 7 | 26 | 7 (83) |
The first step is the one that matters for planning. Fintech sits right on the all-startup median at 15 months, but the spread is wide: a quarter of fintechs made their second hire within 5 months of the first, and a quarter waited more than 27. Of the 37 fintechs whose first hire started at least two years ago, 23 (62%) had a second inside 24 months, and only 4 (11%) are still on one finance person today. After the second hire, fintech keeps going: 30 of the 40 made a third, and 30 a fourth.
Fintech builds the biggest finance teams
This is where fintech separates from everyone else. The 40 fintechs made 266 finance hires between them, a median of 5.5 each. 26 of the 40 (65%) have made five or more. Across all 191 startups the median is 4 and 83 companies (43%) have reached five.
| Latest round announced | Fintech: median hires (companies) | Fintech: five or more | All startups: median hires (companies) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed or seed | 5 (10) | 6 of 10 | 2 (49) |
| Series A | 6 (13) | 8 of 13 | 3.5 (78) |
| Series B or later | 7 (17) | 12 of 17 | 6 (64) |
A seed-stage fintech in this study has typically made as many finance hires as a Series B company elsewhere. That is the fintech point I keep coming back to: when the product moves money, the operations of the business are finance, as I put it on a podcast. It is not the usual shape: when money runs through the product, a lot of the work of running the product is finance work, and the team grows with it.
Who the second hire is: usually someone underneath
| Second hire against the first | Fintech (n=33) | All startups (n=156) |
|---|---|---|
| More junior | 15 (45%) | 77 (49%) |
| Same level | 11 (33%) | 32 (21%) |
| More senior | 7 | 47 (30%) |
The fintech second hire mostly goes underneath or alongside the first person, not over them. The single most common second hire was an accountant or FP&A analyst (12 of 33), then a CFO (9), a head of finance (6), a finance manager (3) and a financial controller (3). Fintech has the highest same-level share of any cut: 11 of 33. Some of that is a CFO followed by a second CFO (4 companies) and a head of finance followed by another (3), which can be a replacement rather than an addition.
The junior second hire is the one that tests how well the first brief was written. If the first person was hired to lead, the second is their first team member, and they should have a big say in who it is. Often they already know the person. One caution for 2026: the transactional end of finance is exactly where AI is landing first. As I said on AccountDads, transactional and early-career finance roles will be hit first: in one example I talked through, automating accounts payable invoices took a team of three or four AP officers and a manager down to one or two people. In fintech the second hire is still usually a person, but brief them for analysis, not processing.
When it becomes a CFO conversation
For 30 of the 40 fintechs, the first finance hire was below CFO. Half of them, 15, have since hired a CFO, a median 32 months after that first hire (middle half 22 to 45 months). The question founders ask me most about that moment is what happens to the person already in the seat.
| At the CFO’s start date | Fintech (15 CFOs) | All startups (65 CFOs) |
|---|---|---|
| First hire still in the role | 9 | 35 |
| First hire had already left | 6 | 27 |
| Could not tell | 0 | 3 |
In 9 of the 15 fintechs, the CFO arrived over the top of the first hire, who was still there. That is the brief I spend the most time on. Handled well, the incumbent is told early, the new CFO is chosen partly for how they will work with that person, and the team gets stronger. Handled badly, you lose the one person who knows where everything is, in the same quarter you hire their boss. As I wrote on LinkedIn, businesses scale exponentially, people don’t.
Where the first hire was a CFO, the pattern repeats one level up: 6 of the 10 fintechs that started with a CFO have since hired another.
For the signs that your fintech has reached the CFO point, I set out when a fintech needs a CFO.
How three recent Australian fintechs built the team
Three fintechs from the study where what happened after the first hire is the interesting part. Titles and months from public profiles and announced rounds; people are not named.
Immutable
Blockchain and trading infrastructure for games, founded 2018
- Rounds
- Series A Sep 2019; Series B Sep 2021; Series C Mar 2022
- First finance hire
- Finance director, August 2019
- Second finance hire
- Finance manager, September 2021
- The CFO
- August 2022, while the finance director was still in role
- Team
- 11 finance hires to 2026
Immutable builds blockchain infrastructure used by games. Its first finance hire was a finance director in August 2019, a month before its Series A. The second came two years later, a finance manager in September 2021, the month of its Series B.
Then the pace changed. Six months later came a much larger Series C. Between February and October 2022, around that round, an accountant, a head of FP&A, a CFO, a corporate finance manager and a VP of finance all started. The CFO arrived in August 2022 over a finance director who stayed another seven months. When a senior finance leader from Immutable joined me on episode 12 of The CFO Track, the conversation was about exactly this kind of pace: acquisitions, refinancing and capital raising on a cycle of months, not years.
Lean teams are very much the flavour of startup life, but lean teams don’t always work either. I put exactly that to Immutable’s senior finance leader on episode 12 of The CFO Track.
The takeaway for a founderWhen the rounds come fast, the team comes fast. Brief the second and third hires in the same breath, and decide early whether the first lead is the future CFO or the person the CFO will rely on.
Zepto
Account-to-account merchant payments, founded 2018
- Rounds
- Series A Mar 2022
- First finance hire
- Director of finance (part-time), April 2020
- Second finance hire
- Head of finance, August 2021: a permanent seat alongside the part-time director
- The CFO
- January 2023, the sixth hire, with the head of finance still in role
- Coverage
- Name too common to search cleanly; a floor
Zepto’s first two finance hires were senior seats at two levels of commitment: a part-time director of finance in April 2020, then a permanent head of finance 16 months later, in August 2021, who worked alongside the director for a further 13 months. On a seniority scale that is a sideways step; in practice it is the moment the company started owning its finance function instead of renting it.
The next three hires went underneath: an FP&A analyst, a senior finance manager a month after the Series A, and a second analyst. Only then, in January 2023, did a CFO arrive, with the head of finance still in the seat for another six months. Nine finance hires in all, with the CFO sixth.
A same-level second hire is often the first hire done properly: part-time cover joined by a permanent seat. Build underneath it before you build above it.
Bridgit
Bridging-loan lender, founded 2021
- Rounds
- Series A Mar 2022; second Series A Jun 2024
- First finance hire
- Head of finance, March 2022
- Second finance hire
- Finance manager, May 2022: down, two months later
- The CFO
- May 2024, the fifth hire, as the head of finance left
- Team
- 8 finance hires to 2026
Bridgit, a bridging-loan lender, hired a head of finance in the month of its Series A and put a finance manager underneath them two months later: the fastest second hire of the three here, and a textbook “more junior” second hire.
The CFO arrived in May 2024, the same month the head of finance left, and a month before the company announced a debt facility alongside a further Series A raise. That is the other way a CFO lands: not over a sitting lead, but into a seat the lead has just left. Three accountants followed in 2025.
For a lender, a head of finance with a manager underneath is a quick, normal second step. The CFO question tends to arrive with the next funding line.
What I would plan for before the second search
Decide whether the second hire is a report or a boss. In fintech the second hire sat below or alongside the first person in 26 of 33 cases. If it is going to be the CFO, the first hire needs to hear that from you before the search starts, not from a recruiter.
Budget for a team, not a person. The fintechs in this data that reached Series B or later made a median seven finance hires (n=17). If your plan has one finance person carrying treasury, reporting, funding lines and the board, it is not a plan.
Expect the business to step up every 18 months. I said it in a short video about finance careers, and it applies to the team just as much:
“Every 18 months the business is going to step to a new level ideally if they’re growing and therefore your skills need to keep evolving and matching the pace of growth.”
Compare: the second hire and the team, by sector
| Cut | First to second hire | Median finance hires | Five or more | CFO over a sitting first hire |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fintech (this page) | 15 (33) | 5.5 | 26 of 40 | 9 of 15 |
| All startups | 16 (156) | 4 | 83 of 191 | 35 of 65 |
| Tech | 15 (64) | 3 | 29 of 82 | 11 of 24 |
| Deep tech | 17 (47) | 4 | 19 of 52 | 13 of 21 |
The second finance hire, in the other cuts: All startups, Tech, Deep tech.
Fintech, the other three questions: Before or after the first raise, How long after a raise, What to hire first. All of them sit in the finance hiring benchmarks series.
Common questions
When do Australian fintechs make their second finance hire?
A median 15 months after the first. Of the 40 funded fintechs in Story Recruitment's study, 33 have made a second finance hire; the middle half did so between 5 and 27 months after the first. Of the 37 fintechs whose first hire started at least two years ago, 23 (62%) had a second within 24 months.
Is a fintech's second finance hire usually more senior or more junior?
More often more junior. Of the 33 fintechs we tracked that made a second finance hire, 15 hired below the first person, 11 at the same level and 7 above, 5 of those 7 a CFO. The most common second hire was an accountant or FP&A analyst (12).
How big do fintech finance teams get?
Bigger than in any other sector we tracked. The 40 fintechs made 266 finance hires between them, a median 5.5 per company, and 26 of 40 have made five or more. Across all 191 startups the median is 4, and 83 have made five or more.
When does a fintech that started below CFO add a CFO?
Half of them have. Of the 30 fintechs we tracked whose first finance hire was below CFO, 15 later hired a CFO, a median 32 months after that first hire. In 9 of the 15 the first hire was still in the seat when the CFO arrived.
What this data cannot tell you
- It does not show that hiring finance earlier or later causes a better outcome. It records the order things happened in. The only outcome test so far was run on the first 102 companies in the study, before it grew to 194. There, the share that raised again within 24 months of the first finance hire ran 55% when the hire came before any round (27 of 49), 47% at Series A (7 of 15) and 33% at Series B or later (2 of 6), and none of those differences could be told apart from chance (Fisher exact test, p=0.77 and p=0.41). Outcomes have not been collected for the full 194, and companies that hire early and companies that raise again are often the same well-organised companies, so no timing figure in this series is an argument for a timing.
- It is a survivor set. Every company announced a round and has at least one finance employee we could find, so the study describes companies that did build an internal finance function. In the 93 of the first 102 companies with a usable status there was not one insolvency, administration or wind-up. It cannot say what share of Australian startups have no finance lead at all.
- Outsourced and fractional finance is invisible. A virtual or fractional CFO supplied by a firm does not list the startup as an employer, so it never appears in public employment records. 16 of the 191 first hires we tracked (8%) were visibly fractional, part-time or interim, and that is a floor. Every “had no finance hire” figure means no internal hire we could find, among the companies we tracked.
- There is no headcount at the time of the hire. Only today’s headcount is public, so nothing here says “they hired a CFO at 40 staff”. The companies run from roughly 2 to 500 staff today.
- Titles are counted once. Each person is recorded at the earliest finance title they held at the company, so a controller promoted to CFO in the same business reads as a controller. Every “later added a CFO” figure is a floor.
- Rounds are dated by announcement. An announcement usually trails the close by weeks, rounds that were never announced are invisible, and grants and research funding are not in the round series. Round amounts are the least reliable field and no figure in this series rests on one. For 12 companies with names too common to search cleanly, past-staff coverage is a floor.
- It is not the market report. Story’s earlier market report on the first finance hire measured something different, the share of recently funded companies with a finance leader at each stage, so its figures and these do not compare directly.
The full method, including how rounds were double-checked and how same-named companies overseas were excluded, is in the study’s methodology section.
How these figures were built
The companies. 194 Australian venture-backed companies whose funding round was found independently by two searches of public funding announcements. 191 have at least one dated finance hire. By sector: 83 tech, 53 deep tech, 40 fintech and 18 other. Sector is tagged from what each company sells, not its industry label: fintech means the product is financial (payments, lending, banking, insurance, wealth, trading or crypto infrastructure).
The hires. Every finance role at each company, current and past, from public professional profiles, dated from the earliest finance role each person held there. 966 finance hires, 907 dated to the month. Titles are grouped into five seats: CFO; head of finance or finance director; financial controller; finance manager; accountant or FP&A analyst. People are not named on any page in this series; case companies are described by title and month only.
Fintech on this page. 40 fintechs and their 266 dated finance hires. Gaps are measured between the start months of consecutive hires. Seniority is compared on five seats; two hires in the same seat count as the same level. A CFO counts as arriving over a sitting first hire when the first hire’s role had not ended by the CFO’s start month. Each person is recorded once, at their earliest finance title, so internal promotions are invisible.
The full method, sources and dating rules are set out in the study methodology. Data read 24 September 2026.
These guides set out how we see it, drawn from the searches we run and the finance leaders we place. They are general information about the market, not financial, accounting or legal advice, and they are no substitute for advice on your own circumstances.