Hong Kong’s Ironfly Technologies spreads wings to London to lure qualified staff as fintech back home takes flight

Hong Kong’s financial technology start-ups are spreading their wings in London as they seek new markets and qualified talent to expand their businesses.

Kevin Mak, CEO of Ironfly Technologies, a three-year-old Hong Kong financial technology, or fintech, company providing a data analytics and trading platform, said the company will open a London branch in the next couple of weeks to help bring in experienced staff.

“Our product is reasonably more complex when it comes to financial technology, so I would say if you’re building an app, sure, you could probably get a lot of people here, or outsource to the Phillipines,” Mak said yesterday.

READ MORE: ‘Fintech is about to disrupt the banking world’: No of start-ups in Hong Kong doubles in 2015 but city unlikely to become Silicon Valley of the East anytime soon

“It’s because we have a more specific type of people that we’re looking for and there’s an older, more established market for that kind of people [in London].”

Speaking at the Hong Kong-London Tech Forum, Mak said another attraction of opening a branch in the English capital is the concentration of potential clients there, many of whom are bigger than in Hong Kong. The start-up is also expanding to Japan and Singapore.

London is home to 40,000 start-ups and is expected see up to 13,000 more in the next decade, with 44,000 employed in fintech start-ups, according to Gordon Innes, CEO of London & Partners.

London’s digital technology firms have seen strong growth since the launch of the Tech City initiative by British Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson in 2010.