30 of 40 funded Australian fintechs we tracked (75%) made their first finance hire below CFO, most often a head of finance or finance director (12). Of the 10 that started with a CFO, 9 have since left, after a median 15 months.
The first hire is usually not a CFO
When I first saw the headline figure across all 191 startups, that 71% started below CFO, my reaction was that it is simply what I see. A founder rarely gets a CFO in first. The first person is a financial controller, or a head of finance or VP of finance. Fintech is no exception: 30 of the 40 funded fintechs we tracked started below CFO, and the single most common first seat was a head of finance or finance director.
| First finance hire | Fintechs | Still in the role | Median months, those who left | Company later hired a CFO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Head of finance or finance director | 12 | 6 | 36 (n=6) | 6 of 12, median 35 months on |
| CFO | 10 | 1 | 15 (n=9) | 6 of 10 hired another CFO |
| Financial controller | 6 | 1 | 21 (n=4) | 3 of 6 |
| Finance manager | 6 | 1 | 20 (n=5) | 3 of 6 |
| Accountant or FP&A analyst | 6 | 2 | 28 (n=4) | 3 of 6 |
| All below CFO | 30 | 10 | 27 (n=19) | 15 of 30 (50%), median 32 months on |
| All fintech first hires | 40 | 11 | 23 (n=28) | - |
Two rows carry the page. The head of finance is the seat fintechs chose most, and the one that stayed: half are still in the role, and the ones who left stayed three years. The CFO is the seat that did not stay: 9 of 10 have gone, half of them within 15 months, and 6 of those 10 companies went on to hire another CFO.
Why the first fintech CFO rarely stays
The CFO-first fintechs have one thing in common: timing. 8 of the 10 made that hire before their first announced round. They bought the top seat early, and then the seat turned over.
The data records that they left, not why, and it cannot say the early CFO hire was a mistake. Some of those people will have done exactly the job they were hired for and moved on. But the pattern matches the one I warn founders about most: buying the CFO seat before there is a full CFO job to do. As I said on Behind The Story, plenty of companies do not need a full-time CFO yet and can save $50,000 to $100,000 with a fractional CFO sitting alongside a strong financial controller or head of finance. Only 4 of the 10 CFO-first hires had held a CFO title in their previous role, so most of these first fintech CFOs were stepping up into the title at the same time as the company was working out what it needed from one.
The head of finance: the seat fintechs pick, and keep
Half of the 12 fintech heads of finance and finance directors hired first are still in the seat. The six who left stayed a median 36 months (n=6, so indicative). That is the longest of any first seat in fintech, and a long way ahead of the CFO.
It does not mean a head of finance is the whole answer. 6 of those 12 companies later hired a CFO above that first person, a median 35 months after them. That is the pattern I wrote about on LinkedIn: finance people are usually excellent at one specific stage of a business, and the pool of people with the range to operate across several stages as the company scales is much smaller in Australia than founders expect. The difference between the two middle seats matters too. As I explained on Celia’s Corner, a financial controller is about controls, compliance and reporting, while a head of finance reaches into the forward-looking work of modelling, budgeting and forecasting. Go in knowing that, and be honest with the candidate at offer stage about whether the CFO seat is on the table.
For what each of these seats actually owns, I compare the CFO, the financial controller and the head of finance.
Before the round, fintechs hire senior. After it, they hire control.
| First finance hire | Hired before the first round (22) | Hired after it (18) |
|---|---|---|
| CFO | 8 | 2 |
| Head of finance or finance director | 7 | 5 |
| Financial controller | 1 | 5 |
| Finance manager | 2 | 4 |
| Accountant or FP&A analyst | 4 | 2 |
The fintechs that hired before their first round went senior: 15 of 22 put a CFO or head of finance in the seat. The ones that raised first and hired afterwards mostly hired a controller or a finance manager, someone to run the books and the controls the new money demands. Only 2 of 18 started with a CFO. Neither order is shown to be better; they are two different jobs, bought at two different moments.
Where fintech first hires come from
Fintech recruits its first finance person from a different pool from the rest of the market. Across all 191 startups, the biggest sources were other startups (37) and private businesses outside tech (38). Fintech leans on banks and big corporates.
| Previous employer | Fintech (n=40) | All startups (n=191) |
|---|---|---|
| Bank or financial institution | 7 | 11 |
| Large corporate outside tech | 7 | 31 |
| Another startup or scale-up | 6 | 37 |
| Private business outside tech | 6 | 38 |
| Accounting, advisory or CFO services firm | 5 | 24 |
| Listed tech company | 4 | 9 |
| Other (including Big Four) or not stated | 5 | 41 |
7 of the 11 first hires in the whole study who came straight from a bank went to a fintech. That makes sense: a lender or payments business wants someone who already understands funding, credit and regulated money. The risk is the one I raised on Behind The Story: a big-brand background is not the same as having built something from zero to one, so test what the person actually built, not where they sat. When I asked the CFO of ASX-listed fintech Beforepay about her path on episode 8 of The CFO Track, I made the point that I see a lot of hiring managers resist people moving across industries, and that a first CFO seat reached by internal promotion is a very different thing from walking into one from outside. None of the 40 fintech first hires in this study came straight from a Big Four firm. And as I wrote about one of startup land’s biggest hiring myths, a corporate background does not stop someone building from scratch.
Three fintechs, three first seats
Two fintechs that started with a CFO and one that started with a head of finance, from the study. The contrast is the point of this page. Titles and months from public profiles and announced rounds; people are not named.
Hello Clever
Real-time pay-by-bank payments and cashback for merchants, founded 2021
- Rounds
- Seed Aug 2022
- First finance hire
- CFO, February 2022
- Against the first round
- 6 months before the seed
- What followed
- First CFO left Oct 2023; commercial finance director 2023; a second CFO Jul 2024
- Status now
- Second CFO in role
Hello Clever runs pay-by-bank payments for merchants, so money moves through the product on every transaction. It hired a CFO in February 2022, the year after it was founded and six months before it announced its seed round.
That first CFO stayed 20 months. A commercial finance director appeared in 2023, a part-time finance manager in May 2024, and a second CFO in July 2024, who is still in the seat. It is the fintech CFO-first pattern from the table above in miniature: the top seat bought before the first round, then filled a second time as the business changed around it.
The first finance hire is the hardest hire most founders will make. I wrote about that on LinkedIn.
The takeaway for a founderA payments business can justify a CFO early. Brief that first CFO for the company two rounds on, because that is the company they will be judged in.
Archa
Corporate cards and business credit, founded 2016
- Rounds
- Pre-Series A Apr 2022
- First finance hire
- CFO, November 2018
- Against the first round
- 41 months before it
- What followed
- Second CFO Mar 2020; head of finance Oct 2020 (stayed to Aug 2024); head of finance Feb 2026
- Status now
- Head of finance in role
Archa issues corporate cards and business credit. It put a CFO in the seat in November 2018, more than three years before its pre-Series A raise and debt facility were announced in April 2022.
That CFO stayed a year. A second CFO started in March 2020 and stayed 17 months. Alongside the second CFO, in October 2020, a head of finance arrived, and that person stayed almost four years, carrying the company through its announced raise. When that head of finance left, the next senior hire, in February 2026, was another head of finance, not a CFO. Two CFOs and neither lasted as long as the head of finance: the fintech pattern in this study, in one company.
If the CFO seat keeps turning over, the business may need a head of finance more than a CFO. Archa’s longest-serving finance lead was its head of finance, not either CFO.
Zeller
Payments terminals and business banking, founded 2020
- Rounds
- Seed Jun 2020; Series A Mar 2021; further raise Jun 2021; Series B Mar 2022
- First finance hire
- Head of finance and analytics, April 2020
- Against the first round
- 2 months before the seed
- Next finance hires
- Junior accountant Jul 2022; accountants 2024 and 2025; FP&A manager May 2025
- Status now
- First hire still in the seat after six years
Zeller makes payment terminals and runs business accounts for merchants. Its head of finance and analytics started in April 2020, two months before the seed round was announced, and was still in the seat through a Series A the company described as one of Australia’s largest pre-launch rounds and a Series B in March 2022.
More than six years on, that first hire is still there, one of the longest-serving first finance hires anywhere in the study. The second finance hire did not come until July 2022, 27 months later, and it was a junior accountant. Zeller shows the other side of the fintech data: a head of finance first, kept, and built underneath.
A head of finance hired before the first cheque can scale a long way if the brief is written for the business two rounds ahead.
What I tell fintech founders about the first seat
Price the seat against complexity 12 to 24 months out. The more common mistake in my experience is under-hiring, not over-hiring. As I wrote when two recruiters gave one founder two different salary bands, a founder prices the role against today’s complexity and is hiring again a year later because the person could not scale. In fintech the complexity arrives early, which is why the head of finance row above is the one I would study. And price it against the right market: a benchmarking report will not tell you what a head of finance in a Series A Sydney fintech is worth. I explained on LinkedIn that I know because I have the conversations.
A title will not fix a timing problem. A head of finance often gets dressed up in a CFO title to close a gap. The first fintech CFOs in this data did not stay long, and a title on its own does not hold anyone in a seat that is not ready for them.
Know what you are buying from a bank. Capital and funding experience are real assets in a lender. Pace and building from scratch are the other half of the job. Test both.
Compare: the first finance hire, by sector
| Cut | Started below CFO | Most common first seat | First CFOs who left: median months | Below-CFO start later added a CFO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fintech (this page) | 30 of 40 (75%) | Head of finance (12) | 15 (n=9) | 15 of 30, median 32 |
| All startups | 135 of 191 (71%) | CFO (56) | 24 (n=38) | 65 of 135, median 26 |
| Tech | 62 of 82 (76%) | CFO (20) | 21 (n=13) | 24 of 62, median 23 |
| Deep tech | 32 of 52 (62%) | CFO (20) | 29 (n=12) | 21 of 32, median 18 |
Fintech is the one cut where the most common first seat is not a CFO, and where the first CFOs who left stayed the shortest time.
What to hire first, 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, The second finance hire. All of them sit in the finance hiring benchmarks series.
Common questions
Should a fintech's first finance hire be a CFO?
Most Australian fintechs did not start there. Of the 40 funded fintechs in Story Recruitment's study, 30 (75%) made their first finance hire below CFO: a head of finance or finance director (12), a financial controller (6), a finance manager (6) or an accountant or FP&A analyst (6). 10 started with a CFO.
How long does a fintech's first CFO stay?
Of the 10 fintechs we tracked whose first finance hire was a CFO, 9 of those CFOs have left, after a median 15 months (n=9). 6 of the 10 companies later hired another CFO. The data records when people left, not why.
How long does a fintech's first head of finance stay?
Longer. Of the 12 fintechs we tracked whose first finance hire was a head of finance or finance director, 6 are still in the role, and the 6 who left stayed a median 36 months. 6 of the 12 companies later added a CFO above that first hire, a median 35 months after it.
Where do fintechs find their first finance hire?
More often from banks and large corporates than other startups do. Of the 40 fintech first hires in the study, 7 came directly from a bank or financial institution and 7 from a large corporate outside tech, against 6 from another startup. Across all 191 startups, other startups and private businesses were the largest sources.
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 fintech first hires. “Later hired a CFO” counts a different person with a CFO title joining after the first hire; each person is recorded once, at their earliest finance title, so a first hire promoted into the CFO seat inside the company is not counted and the upgrade figures are a floor. Previous employer is read from the first hire’s public profile and labelled by hand.
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.