Lissele Pratt: Capitalixe Cofounder, helping businesses navigate payments & banking solutions, honored by Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe 2021.
Fintech is one of the fastest-growing industries, scaling at record speed. This year alone, the industry has increased hiring by 32% in the U.K., despite ongoing economic headwinds. On top of this, the U.K. fintech market is projected to grow at a 9.9% CAGR from 2025 to 2033, reaching $16.9 billion by 2033, reflecting strong long-term expansion.
With all of this speed and scale, it can be easy to overlook the very people who have made this growth possible: your employees.
As a result, culture can oftentimes be treated as something that will just happen as a company expands. In reality, this isn’t the case, and culture struggles to keep pace.
This article will explore how fintech leaders can protect team cohesion and core values during periods of rapid growth.
Scaling People Vs. Scaling Culture
Approximately 75% of companies that secure VC funding still end up failing, and 35% don’t make it past Series A before closing their doors.
PWR teams have attributed this partly to team expansion: “You’ll need more hands on deck to match your bigger goals. Scaling up your team with new hires without losing your culture, quality, and efficiency is one of the hardest balancing acts.”
The challenge is that while talent can scale almost overnight, culture rarely does. When companies onboard dozens (or even hundreds) of new hires in a short window, the values and working rhythms that defined the early team start to stretch thin. New employees may not experience the same level of context, mentorship or alignment, and without intentional effort, culture becomes fragmented.
This fragmentation has a ripple effect. Teams begin to operate in silos. Communication gets muddled. Decisions take longer. The speed and creativity that once gave the startup an edge start to slow under the weight of inconsistency.
With this in mind, some practices I’ve found really helpful include:
• Bake culture into onboarding. Too many companies treat onboarding as admin. I see it as culture transfer. Every new hire should leave their first week knowing not just what we do, but why we do it and how their role fits into the bigger story.
• Train managers to be culture carriers. If your managers aren’t reinforcing culture, it doesn’t matter what you put on a slide deck. Invest in leadership training early, so managers understand they’re not just responsible for delivery but for shaping team identity.
• Communicate until you feel like a broken record. One email or one presentation isn’t enough. Leaders need to model values, repeat them and tie decisions back to them constantly. Culture is built through repetition and consistency.
Leadership Blind Spots
Many fintechs start with strong founder-driven values, and in the early days, it works. The founder sets the tone, and the team naturally adopts it.
However, once head count triples post-funding, leaders often assume culture will trickle down on its own, but in reality, it rarely does. The informal ways that worked with a small team break down under the pressure of rapid growth. Teams become misaligned, communication falters and new hires can struggle to understand how to operate within the company’s culture.
Mark Astbury, Director at Morgan McKinley U.K., highlights this shift perfectly. He notes that fintechs are moving from “rapid-fire” scaling to more deliberate, strategic expansion, which implies that you can’t rely on informal culture transmission anymore. Growth at pace requires intentional effort.
Manager readiness is another critical blind spot. Startups often promote early employees into leadership roles without formal training. According to WTW, over a third of U.K. fintech managers had less than a year of leadership experience before taking on their first management role, and more than half reported “learning on the job” with minimal guidance. The result is often the replication of founder biases, uneven team cohesion and higher burnout rates, all of which undermine the very culture leaders hope will scale.
To me, the solution is clear here. Culture must be codified early, embedded into every layer of leadership and actively reinforced. Whitecap Consulting’s 2024 survey of scaling fintechs found that 67% of founders regretted not formalizing culture in the first year, reporting friction between legacy teams and new hires once head count expanded. If culture is left informal, even the most talented teams struggle to stay aligned under rapid growth.
Here’s how this can be achieved:
• Write it down, and mean it. If your values aren’t codified in a way that people can actually use, they’re meaningless. Stop hoping everyone will just get it, and spell out behaviors and decision-making principles that guide real work.
• Hire for values, not just skills. Skills can be taught, but cultural alignment can’t. If someone doesn’t live your values, they’ll erode your culture.
• Lock it into rituals and recognition. Celebrate behaviors that embody your values. Recognition, rituals and feedback loops aren’t optional; they’re the glue that keeps culture from unraveling as you grow.
Final Thoughts
Culture doesn’t scale on its own. It requires deliberate effort, clear values and leaders who understand that shaping behavior and reinforcing norms are as important as hitting targets or raising capital. From onboarding to leadership development and recognition rituals to constant communication, every layer of your organization must actively support the culture you want to see.
The companies that succeed aren’t just those that scale head count or revenue the fastest; they’re the ones that scale their culture with the same rigor. By codifying values, embedding them into leadership and celebrating the behaviors that bring them to life, fintech leaders can preserve cohesion, maintain engagement and keep the spark that made their business successful in the first place.
Growth is inevitable. Culture isn’t. Make it intentional.
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