Fintech Layoffs Pile Up

2022 has been a rough year for many fintech employees. The year started out with just a few layoffs but had an exponential increase totaling in at 219,959 layoffs from 1,405 tech companies.

Financial services company Plaid, for example, recently announced plans to lay off 20% of employees, which is about 260 staff members.

“Today, I’m announcing the most difficult change we have had to make at Plaid to date,” wrote Plaid CEO Zachary Perret in a Dec. 7th website post. “I made the hard decision to reduce the size of our team, and in doing so, to say goodbye to approximately 260 talented Plaids.”

Perret alluded to over-hiring as a result of the surge in business during covid. They are not alone. Companies including Klarna, Coinbase, Kabbage, and Amazon have laid off substantial amounts of staff. January started off low with 631 employee layoffs and that later increased to over 6,000 in February. November tallied 59,785 layoffs, weighing in with the highest number of employees laid off compared to any other month this year.