And why the firms still benchmarking against "market rate" are haemorrhaging their best people to companies that understood the shift eighteen months ago.
There is a statistic buried in Ravio's November 2025 compensation data, drawn from over 215 fintechs, including firms like Airwallex, Wise, and Trustly, that should fundamentally change how every assistant in financial technology thinks about their worth. Fintech companies pay 11–19% above the broader tech market on average. At the executive level, the premium is 33%.¹
Let that land for a moment. Not 33% above the general administrative market. 33% above tech, which already pays more than most other industries for the same roles. We are talking about a sector that has quietly built a compensation structure for senior support that sits in a category of its own, and most of the people working in it, and most of the firms hiring into it, have not caught up to what the data is actually saying.
The general executive assistant market in the United States has been flat to declining. Salary.com reported that median executive assistant salaries actually dropped slightly from $52,775 in 2023 to $51,788 in 2025.² Glassdoor's own commentary flags that administrative salaries are experiencing "below average growth due to automation and software."³ If you read those numbers in isolation, you would conclude that the assistant profession is shrinking, that AI is doing exactly what everyone predicted, and that the smart career move is to get out.
You would be wrong, if you happen to work in fintech.
Because while the average is sinking, the top of this market is pulling away at a pace that has no precedent in the history of the profession. The gap between what a solid executive assistant earns in a mid-tier corporate environment and what an exceptional executive assistant earns inside a well-funded fintech is now so wide that they are barely the same job. The title is the same. The work, the expectations, the compensation, and the career trajectory are not.
You do not need to be an investor to understand what is happening to executive assistant pay in fintech. You just need to understand one thing: when a company raises a lot of money, everything around the founder gets more complicated, and the person managing that complexity gets more valuable.
After three difficult years where funding dried up across the sector, fintech investment came roaring back in 2025. KPMG's latest Pulse of Fintech report showed that global investment jumped 21% year-over-year, the first real recovery since the boom years.⁴ But here is the part that matters most for anyone in an executive assistant role: the money did not spread evenly. Fewer companies raised, but the ones that did raised significantly larger rounds. The strong got stronger. The well-known names, Revolut closing at a $75 billion valuation, PhonePe pulling in $600 million, ID.me topping $2 billion⁴, got bigger, more complex, and more demanding overnight.
Innovate Finance called it a "flight to quality."⁵ Capital poured into the companies that were already winning, and those companies scaled aggressively as a result.
Why does this matter if you are an executive assistant? Because when a fintech company goes from fifty people to two hundred, or from two hundred to five hundred, the founder's world does not just get busier. It gets fundamentally different. Suddenly there is a real board with real expectations. There are investors who need managing, not just updating. There are regulatory requirements that did not exist two rounds ago. There is a leadership team that needs coordination. There are external relationships, with press, with partners, with counterparties, that carry real consequences if they are mishandled. The number of people who want access to the founder triples. The sensitivity of the information flowing through their office increases by an order of magnitude.
The person sitting at the centre of all of that, managing the access, filtering the information, representing the founder to people who matter enormously, that person has just become one of the most important hires in the building. The companies that raised those big rounds in 2025 are not posting executive assistant roles at £45,000 and hoping for the best. They are paying what it actually costs to get someone who can operate in that environment without supervision, without hand holding, and without making the kind of mistake that has consequences nobody wants to deal with.
For decades, the assumed hierarchy of executive assistant compensation ran like this: investment banking and private equity at the top, followed by hedge funds and family offices, then big tech, then everything else. That hierarchy was stable because those firms had the most demanding principals, the longest hours, the highest stakes, and compensation to match. An executive assistant at Goldman Sachs or Blackstone could reasonably assume they were at or near the top of the pay scale for the profession.
In New York City, financial services remains the highest-paying industry for executive assistants, with a median total pay of $113,133 according to Glassdoor.⁶ But that is a sector-wide average that includes insurance companies, retail banks, asset managers, and a long tail of mid-tier financial firms that pull the number down. The fintech companies operating at the top of that sector are paying well beyond the median, and they are doing it without the rigid salary structures that constrain compensation at traditional institutions.
Fintech companies are fighting for the same executive assistants that PE firms want, that big tech wants, that family offices want. The executive assistant who would be perfect for a fintech CEO is often someone who could equally work at a bulge-bracket bank, at Google, or at a top-tier private equity firm. To win that person, fintech has to match or beat all three. Every time a well-funded fintech hires an executive assistant at a premium, it resets the market expectation for the next hire. The ratchet only turns one way.
Robert Half's 2026 Salary Guide puts London executive assistant salaries between £52,250 and £87,750, with the top end driven almost exclusively by financial services and technology firms.⁷ Across Europe, finance and technology sectors now command 20–35% premiums over general market rates for executive assistants.⁸ In London specifically, finance sector executive assistants receive an average additional cash compensation of £4,148 per year on top of their base salary.⁸ These numbers still understate the reality at the sharp end, because the executive assistants supporting fintech founders through IPO preparation, major fundraises, and regulatory transformation are negotiating packages that include equity, performance bonuses, and total compensation that puts them closer to $200,000 than the averages would suggest.
The standard narrative is clean and logical: AI automates administrative tasks, administrative tasks are the core of the executive assistant role, therefore executive assistant salaries should fall as AI adoption rises. If you believe the executive assistant role is defined by its administrative output, the scheduling, the inbox, the travel, the document prep, then that logic holds. For the segment of the market where the role really is those things, AI is compressing both demand and compensation. The data confirms it. General executive assistant salaries are flat to declining.
But in fintech, and specifically at the senior end, AI is having the opposite effect. It is stripping away the transactional noise that used to consume half the day, and what is left underneath is the work that no machine can touch: reading a room. Managing a relationship that is going sideways. Knowing when a deal is losing momentum based on signals that would never appear in any dataset. Picking up the phone and getting information that does not exist in any formal channel. Exercising the kind of judgement that only comes from years of accumulated trust and genuine proximity to the principal's world.
Storm2's 2026 FinTech Salary Guide found that 84% of fintech talent leaders planned to expand AI use in 2026.⁹ The firms adopting AI most aggressively are also the firms investing most heavily in senior human support around their principals. That is not a contradiction. It is cause and effect. The more these founders use AI themselves, the more clearly they see where it helps and where it falls completely short. That clarity is translating directly into what they are willing to pay for the human layer that sits above it.
Boldly's analysis of the executive assistant market heading into 2026 put it well: "In 2026, the most valuable executive assistants will be those who can leverage these tools while providing the strategic thinking and relationship management that technology can't replicate. This skill set commands a premium."¹⁰
The premium exists because the contrast has sharpened. A CEO who uses AI every day knows it can draft a brief but cannot read the tension in a board member's email. It can summarise a meeting, but cannot tell them which relationship in the room needs attention before something breaks. It can process information at scale but cannot exercise taste, discretion, or the kind of social intelligence that comes from being a real person in a real relationship with other real people.
The assistants who can do those things, and who can use AI to handle everything else, are not becoming less valuable. They are becoming the scarcest resource in the building. Scarcity, as any fintech founder will tell you, is what drives price.
In 2025, regulators across the US and Europe significantly tightened oversight of the fintech sector. New frameworks around banking-as-a-service, stablecoins, AI-assisted decision-making, and more.⁹ The result was a sharp increase in hiring demand for compliance and risk professionals, with top-tier salaries in those functions now rivalling what engineers get paid.⁹
What does that have to do with executive assistant salaries?
When a fintech CEO's regulatory exposure increases, every part of their operating environment gets more sensitive. Board interactions carry more weight. Investor communications need more care. The volume of confidential, legally significant correspondence grows. The number of people who need managing, regulators, lawyers, compliance officers, board members and investors, expands significantly. The person managing the flow of all of that, deciding who gets access and when, handling documents that carry legal weight, briefing the principal before meetings where a wrong word could trigger a regulatory inquiry, is the executive assistant.
In this environment, the executive assistant is not an administrative hire. They are a risk management hire. They are handling information that, if mismanaged, has consequences that go far beyond a missed meeting or a late email. The principals who understand this, and in fintech, increasingly all of them do, are not willing to expose themselves to that risk by underpaying for the role. They pay for discretion. They pay for judgement. They pay for someone who understands the stakes without needing to be told.
Ravio's data showed a 37% premium for UK fintech firms in risk management roles, dramatically higher than other functions.¹ That number applies to dedicated risk professionals rather than executive assistants specifically. But it tells you something about what happens to compensation when regulatory pressure rises. Everyone in the orbit of that pressure becomes more valuable. Nobody sits closer to it than the person managing the principal's calendar, communications, and information flow.
London deserves its own section because the contradictions here are the sharpest of any market in the world.
The UK is the leading fintech market in Europe. London hosts 70% of the top executive assistant roles in the country. The density of fintech firms between Shoreditch, the City, and Canary Wharf creates a concentration of demand for senior executive support that is hard to match anywhere.
Yet the headline salary data looks underwhelming. Indeed reports an average London executive assistant salary of £47,378. Glassdoor puts it at £46,681.¹¹ ¹² Those numbers are real, but they are also deeply misleading, because they throw the executive assistant at a 50-person consultancy in Holborn into the same average as the executive assistant at a Series D payments company in Shoreditch. Those two roles have almost nothing in common beyond the job title.
The fintech-specific picture is a different world. Robert Half's 2026 data shows senior executive assistant salaries in London reaching £87,750.⁷ Morgan McKinley's 2025 guide puts experienced London executive assistants at £50,000–£60,000 as a baseline, with financial services pushing well beyond.¹³ At the very top, the executive assistants supporting fintech founders through IPO preparation, major fundraises, international expansion, and the kind of regulatory transformation that turns a founder's life upside down, the packages move into territory that would have been unimaginable for this role five years ago.
The gap between the average London executive assistant salary and the top-end fintech executive assistant salary is now roughly 80–90%. That is not a gentle gradient. It is a chasm, and it is widening every quarter as fintech companies compete for people that the traditional firms assumed would always be available to them at the rates they have always paid.
The firms losing this competition are the ones still benchmarking against "market rate." The ones winning are the ones who have stopped pretending there is a single market and started paying for what they actually need.
If you are an executive assistant working in fintech right now, or thinking about moving into the sector, here is what the data is telling you.
The compensation premium is real. It is being driven by forces, capital flowing into fewer, bigger companies, AI adoption accelerating, regulatory complexity increasing, and intense competition for talent, that are getting stronger, not weaker. This is not a temporary spike. It is a repricing of the role in response to a genuine increase in what it demands and what it delivers.
If you are a fintech founder or CEO reading this and your executive assistant salary benchmarking is based on general administrative data, you are working with information that is at best eighteen months out of date and at worst from a completely different profession.
The executive assistant you need is not competing for their next role against other executive assistant jobs. They are being courted by PE firms, family offices, late-stage tech companies, and your direct competitors, who have adjusted their compensation to reflect the reality of what this role demands in 2026.
Treating the executive assistant hire as a cost line is the most expensive mistake you can make, because the cost of losing an exceptional executive assistant in fintech, the institutional knowledge they carry, the relationships they have built, the trust they have earned from your investors and your board, is not replaceable at any salary. It is replaceable over time, but the time it takes is time you do not have in a sector that punishes delay and rewards speed above almost everything else.
The firms that understood this eighteen months ago have the best people. The firms that are still debating whether to pay above market are the ones whose best people are already taking calls from recruiters who did the maths.
This paper was produced by Blackbook. We place executive assistants and chiefs of staff into the most demanding environments in financial services and technology, including the fintech firms that are redefining what this role looks like and what it is worth. If you are hiring for senior executive support in fintech, or if you are an executive assistant ready to move into the sector, we would like to hear from you.
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Sources
¹ Ravio, "How competitive are salaries at the world's top 100 fintechs?," November 2025
² Salary.com, "Executive Assistant I Salary," November 2025
³ Glassdoor, "Executive Assistant: Average Salary & Pay Trends 2026," United States, March 2026
⁴ KPMG, "Pulse of Fintech: H2 2025 — Global Insights," February 2026
⁵ Innovate Finance, "FinTech Investment Landscape 2025," January 2026
⁶ Glassdoor, "Executive Assistant Salary in New York City, NY," February 2026
⁷ Robert Half, "Executive Assistant Salary in London," 2026 UK Salary Guide
⁸ Consolidated data from Glassdoor, PayScale, Robert Half, "Executive Assistant Salary Europe: Complete 2026 Compensation Guide," March 2026
⁹ Storm2, "FinTech Salary Guide USA 2026: Hiring & Market Trends," November 2025
¹⁰ Boldly, "How Much Should You Pay For An Executive Assistant?," December 2025
¹¹ Indeed, "Executive Assistant salary in London," February 2026
¹² Glassdoor, "Executive Assistant Salary in London," February 2026
¹³ Morgan McKinley, "Executive Assistant Salaries in London," 2025 Salary Guide
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