NEW DELHI: Away from regulators, a new industry has risen to make banking easier for customers. And, this sunrise sector — financial technology , or fintech — is attracting hoards of top talent from across industries. Last week, Flipkart made two highprofile hires for its fintech business, while, in the recent months, Paytm roped in PwC ’s Shinjini Kumar to be chief executive of its yet-to-launch payments bank. It also named Krishna Hegde, a top executive of Barclays , to head the company’s consumer investment products division for the payments bank and Vipin Surelia, a former deputy general manager at Reserve Bank of India, to its leadership team. Globally, Anshu Jain, Deutsche Bank’s former co-CEO, is said to be joining US company SoFi. Bengaluru-based Scripbox CEO Ashok Kumar has come from Cisco. Arjun Ramnath, senior product manager, previously held the same position at LinkedIn, California.Fintech is an umbrella term that covers technology-based companies operating in insurance, payment, asset management, etc. With it transforming banking business as we know it and disrupting mammoth banks, headhunters see a greater shift of talent towards it. “Finance technology is a booming segment in India with the opening of numerous mobile wallet companies, non-banking financing companies and now payments banks — all running on robust digital platforms,” said AG Rao, group managing director of ManpowerGroup India. The segment is generating a lot of new jobs, most clustered around mobile, user experience and financial analysis, he said.In Scripbox with 80 employees, average age is 27 and average leadership age is 34. For both Kumar and Ramnath, motivation to move from big name firms to a fintech startup was simple: similarities between them and the startup’s founders.With more than 117 million Indians using smartphones and over 160 million connected to the Internet, a large number of companies have been coming up with products to assist customers. A lot of that is happening in financial sector where technology is developing at a rapid rate, disrupting traditional banking. Industry experts predict that professionals with deep domain and design knowledge will be in great demand.Premised on low-cost, high-tech models to deal with low-value, high-volume customers, the likes of Mobikwik, Capital Float, MSwipe, Citrus Pay and Ezetap have raised $150 million-plus in India. For young employees, they come with a promise of stock options and open work culture.“Considering this is a newly evolved industry, it will see at least a 20% increase in hiring due to new e-wallets and payments banks. It will be due to large scale of business (ecommerce) and financials going online," explained Ajay Shah, assistant vice president at Teamlease Services.Meanwhile, BFSI sector is also stepping up recruitment of highly talented IT professionals, especially those with an understanding of finance. “It is to be seen is whether the BFSI sector will acqui-hire FinTech firms or will the ‘new kids on the block’ swallow up the BFSI incumbents,” said Vivek Madhukar, chief operating officer at TimesJobs.com.For BFSI companies that have been practicing traditional ways of physical banking, fintech will give access to 300 million new customers (Internet and smartphone users). “Earlier, something as basic as booking a taxi would involve cash transactions and even that’s completely moving online via products like mobile wallets,” said Alka Dingra, assistant general manager, Teamlease Services.Talent drain is a very real problem for BFSI sector to fintech domain, and it is only going to increase in the coming months, Rao of ManPower-Group said. “Companies are stating the fact that they go head-to-head when it comes to technology talent.”There is no doubt investment banks and fintech companies are locked in a war for the best technology talent, desperate to invest in IT to keep up with the digital revolution. In this sense, technology is impressively advanced in financial services , which are both an opportunity and a threat for banks," he added.Today, over half the employers looking to hire want employees with just two years of work experience, shows a data point from TimesJobs. MasterCard , a traditional financial services company that manages global payments, says 80% of its current workforce in India is millennial."There's a big technology story in India, we're creating a diverse organisational culture world over with 40% millennials in our workforce. But in India, that figure is double as we are hiring many more individuals in their early careers,” chief talent officer David Deacon told ET.In India, fintech is synonymous with just payment technology, even as there are 11 lending fintech unicorns globally. The sector is expected to expand here as well, say experts, covering hitherto untapped areas such as lending and personal finance