Janine Hirt

A policy and trade specialist who crossed into fintech to help reshape who financial services work for.

How Janine Hirt left their lane.

Janine Hirt moved from international affairs into fintech in 2015 – and now leads the industry body representing the UK sector.

Janine Hirt’s route into fintech did not begin in finance.

She studied English and Political Science at Boston College, then moved to Japan, where what was meant to be a year teaching English became four years working across training and cultural exchange. She later returned to study International Relations at the London School of Economics.

What followed was a career around international systems rather than financial products.

At the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce and later Chatham House, Hirt worked across trade, policy and international relations, building connections between institutions, businesses and people operating across borders.

Then, in 2015, she joined the initial leadership team at Innovate Finance.

The organisation had been created the previous year to represent a UK fintech sector that was growing quickly and challenging some of the assumptions traditional financial services had been built around. Hirt joined as Head of Community, became COO in 2017 and stepped up as CEO in 2021.

Her argument for fintech has never been technology for technology’s sake. She has consistently made the case for a financial system that is more democratic, transparent and inclusive, using innovation to widen access rather than simply make existing processes faster.

Hirt came to financial services from outside the industry.

That distance has given her a different question to ask of it: not simply what can finance do next, but who should it work better for.