In fintech, growth plans often get the most attention. While funding rounds, customer acquisition and product innovation tend to dominate the conversation, one of the most important drivers of sustainable growth is frequently overlooked: organisational culture.
The reality is that many fintech organisations, particularly founder-led businesses, do not spend enough time actively thinking about the culture they need to achieve their ambitions. Culture is often delegated to HR, reduced to a values exercise, or simply left to evolve on its own, resulting in cultural drift.
That can be a costly mistake.
When culture is left to chance
Every organisation has a culture, whether it has defined one or not. The question is whether that culture is helping or hindering success.
When leaders fail to intentionally shape culture, it tends to develop organically through behaviours, informal norms, and unwritten rules. Over time, those patterns can become deeply embedded, regardless of whether they support the organisation’s goals.
In high-growth fintech environments, this can lead to cultures that actively undermine performance. Decision-making becomes inconsistent. Collaboration suffers. Accountability weakens. In some cases, negative behaviours become normalised and create toxic environments that damage both employee experience and business outcomes.
Culture should be an accelerator of growth, not a barrier to it.
When culture eats unicorns for breakfast…
The firm had grown around a larger-than-life founder to reach a headcount of 500 with offices around the globe and almost $20Bn in AUM, had become a unicorn fintech and was set for a $7Bn stock market flotation. However, under the surface of the firm, behaviours had emerged which, ultimately led to its downfall. People issues were always seen as way down the list to financial performance. Leaders at the very top of the firm had never been intentional about the culture they wanted to build. Poor behaviours at the top became mirrored all the way down the organisation. The result? The firm fell from grace spectacularly, resulting in insolvency and close to 500 jobs being lost overnight. At its heart, the firm had never been proactive about shaping a culture which could secure long-term growth and success. Neglecting to tackle poor behaviours and permitting the worst corporate excesses allowed a negative and destructive culture to evolve with no checks and balances. Implosion was the inevitable outcome.
What high-performing fintechs do differently
The strongest fintechs we work with take a fundamentally different approach.
Rather than leaving culture to chance, they are intentional about defining the type of organisation they want to build and the behaviours that will help them achieve their strategic goals.
Importantly, this is not solely a HR-led exercise. The most successful fintech organisations recognise that culture is a leadership responsibility. Founders, CEOs, and executive teams take ownership for defining what success looks like and how people need to work together to achieve it.
Founders have a particularly influential role to play. In the early stages of growth, a fintech founder’s informal behaviours will define the culture naturally. What they reward, tolerate and role-model all become part of the culture. Employees observe their founder, watching them much more closely than they read corporate value statements given the overriding influence that a founder has within their organisation. As company headcount grows, a founder’s informal cultural signals become less visible to employees at every layer of the organisation. This provides the founder with a greater responsibility to take ownership for defining the right culture formally, and reinforcing this in a way that it reaches everyone, and in a way that everyone understands.
Client success story
Following a spin-out from a major investment bank, we worked with a fintech creating widely used stock market indices that serve as benchmarks for mutual funds and ETFs as it progressed a from a handful of employees to become the global market leader with over 6,000 people across a 14-year period. The Founder’s major objective was growth. He and his leadership team were highly intentional about the culture, values and behaviours which the firm needed to achieve that ambition. ENGAGE worked with the firm to assess the leadership team and then define, communicate and embed the behaviours which would be most critical in the first phase of growth to reach $1Bn in revenue. However, leaders also realised that, to reach their next growth milestones ($2Bn and then $3Bn), they would need to keep evolving that culture. As the speed of growth increased, we worked with the leadership group to keep redefining the culture needed and adding new behaviours required as the firm became more global, complex and significant in the market. By embedding such a strong culture, measuring it regularly and evolving it in an agile way, over the timespan of our work the firm’s share price has risen from $38 to $557 and the firm’s market cap has grown from $5.3Bn, peaking at $50.48Bn.
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High-performing fintechs also avoid a common trap: over-focusing on values. Values have an important role to play. They help describe what an organisation stands for and can provide a useful cultural compass. However, values alone are often too abstract to drive meaningful change. Behaviours are where culture becomes real; they are tangible, observable, and measurable. Behaviours provide clarity about what great performance looks like in practice. They shape how decisions are made, how teams collaborate, how leaders lead, and ultimately how strategy gets executed. The strongest cultures are built around clear behavioural expectations, not just aspirational statements on a wall.
Intentionally building a culture that drives success
At ENGAGE, we believe culture should never exist in isolation from your strategic goals.
Our approach starts with a simple but powerful question: what are you trying to achieve as an organisation? Only once that is clear do we ask the next question: what does the culture here need to look like to help achieve those goals? This ensures culture is designed with purpose. It becomes a strategic enabler rather than a standalone people initiative.
The next step is understanding the gap between today’s reality and tomorrow’s ambition for the culture.
Leaders need an honest assessment of their current culture and how well it supports their strategic objectives. One of the simplest and most effective exercises we facilitate is asking fintech leaders three simple questions about the elements of the current culture at their organisation:
- What do you want to keep?
- What do you want to remove?
- What do you want to add?
These discussions quickly surface the behaviours, norms, and practices that are helping or hindering success. From there, organisations can define the specific behavioural shifts required to create a culture capable of supporting future growth.
Client success story
Following a strategic restructuring, a crypto asset management company created a new technology start-up and recognised that its existing culture was unlikely to support the growth, innovation, and agility required for the future. Rather than allowing culture to develop organically, the organisation took a deliberate, evidence-based approach to designing a distinct tech-focused culture from first principles. Through leadership interviews, employee co-creation workshops, tailored culture assessment, and smart analytics, the business defined a new set of values and behaviours aligned to its strategic ambitions, before embedding them across the employee lifecycle through a dedicated Culture Playbook. This intentional approach gave the start-up a clear cultural identity, strengthened employee ownership and engagement, and established a foundation to support long-term growth and innovation. The business grew fast and was later sold to the largest digital asset and cryptocurrency prime brokerage in the world.
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Culture is too important to delegate
For ambitious fintech firms, culture is not a “soft” topic. It is a strategic lever that influences execution, performance, innovation, and growth.
The greatest risk for a scaling fintech is not that it won’t develop a culture. It’s that it will develop one by accident. By the time the consequences become visible, the cost of fixing them is often far greater than the investment required to shape them intentionally from the start.
The organisations that scale successfully are rarely the ones that leave culture to self-evolve. They are the ones whose leaders deliberately define the environment they need, model the behaviours they expect, and align culture to strategy.
Because culture is not what is written in a values document. Culture is what people do every day.
And the most successful fintech leaders know that if they want to shape the future of their business, they must first be intentional about shaping the culture that will get them there.
Want to find out more?
Download the Target Culture Framework paper to learn more about how this helps clients embed strong cultures that consistently drive success.
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