FinTech Startups Take Advantage Of Talent Pool In Dublin

Dublin, the capital of Ireland, is a burgeoning hub for startups in the technology sector. The city is home to European offices for multinational technology companies, as well as banks and startups.

Trezeo, a FinTech startup that seeks to smooth out income for self-employed workers, is one of the innovators that call Dublin home. The idea behind Trezeo is to give these workers a consistent paycheck each month, which can be a challenge as their income can depend on how much work they complete.

However, Trezeo seeks to address that uncertainty. The company calculates how much a worker should earn based on their income patterns and provides them with a steady paycheck each month. When workers earn more than usual, Trezeo saves the excess money for them. Conversely, the startup tops them off by using credit when workers earn less than usual.

Flavien Charlon, Trezeo’s co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), is originally from France, but moved to Ireland to work for one of the multinational tech companies before jumping into the startup world. Charlon said that Dublin is an attractive place to FinTech firms for several reasons. For one, the country is in the European Union (EU), so there is easy access to the European market. In addition, importantly, many multinationals have established their European offices in Dublin — for tax reasons — and bring in skilled workers.

“They have such a big need for talent [that] they also bring people from the rest of Europe into Ireland,” Charlon told PYMNTS in an interview. “It creates a pool of talent here in Ireland.”

Kieran Donoghue, head of international financial Services, corporate strategy and public policy at IDA Ireland, told the Irish Independent that “companies can easily source technology skills from across Europe, and all European passport holders can work in Ireland without a work permit or visa,” he said.

In terms of neighborhoods where tech workers congregate, one area of the city has been named Silicon Docks. It’s essentially a “miniature version of Silicon Valley,” Charlon said. That area was once a center for trade of cattle, along with ship builders and glassmakers. But, in the 80s and 90s, the population declined and “U2 recorded albums at studios amid the abandoned warehouses,” The Wall Street Journal reported in an article about the area in 2015.

However, the area started to incline after the Dublin Docklands Development Authority came into existence in 1997 to breathe new life into the zone. In 2004, Google arrived and other firms such as Facebook and Twitter came on the scene. Tech-savvy firms continue to arrive in Dublin: Payments firm Stripe, for example, said in February that it would open an engineering office in Dublin.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison told Reuters,“Ireland has had … a consistent approach of being outward-looking and globally minded.”