Established fintechs, startups, banks and tech giants alike are pulling out all the stops to attract and retain the same pool of tech talent.

Some firms move operations to where the people are, others acquire the companies with the talent they’re looking for, and others simply loosen their purse strings. Many do all the above and more.

Bill.com announced this week it’s opening a 25,000 square foot office in Houston because of the city’s focus on STEM-related professions. The digital business payments firm, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is rapidly growing and in the market for a team of developers and customer support professionals, with other roles to follow.

René Lacerte, founder and CEO of Bill.com, said in a statement it was “critical” to find the right combination of “talent, quality of life and business-friendliness” in the company’s next office location.

Drew Edwards, founder and CEO of instant payments fintech Ingo Money, based in Alpharetta, Georgia, told Bank Innovation he had to relocate and build out a high-tech corporate facility with all the accouterments that used to be found in Silicon Valley only. He said things like free-food cafeterias, outside grills, loud music and lots of open spaces are almost expected in the work environment these days.

“Fintechs have an advantage because we issue equity stock options, and there’s the promise of big upsides,” he said. “And, so, we’ve used that a lot more than we did in the past — bigger equity components along with cash and incentives components.”

But attracting talent is not as hard as keeping it, Edwards said, adding there’s “no doubt” his company’s cost for technology resources has gone up in the last three or four years.

“I don’t mean in aggregate, I mean for the same job, per head,” he said. “The cost of a mobile iOS developer or Android developer, I bet, is up 30% just in the last two years. It’s the flip side of a low unemployment rate in a hot tech market.”

Also see: Is Consumer Choice as Much a Factor as Speed in Payments Innovation?

Arik Shtilman, co-founder and CEO of fintech-as-a-service startup Rapyd, told Bank Innovation that attracting and retaining tech talent is the No. 1 challenge his company’s management team debates in its Monday meeting each week.

“There is a very limited talent pool and we are in a very competitive market, up against the Googles, the Facebooks and the PayPals of the world,” he said.

Shtilman said his London-based firm’s “technological edge” has served its recruiting efforts well, being a young company developing solutions used by a range of top 500 companies that include one of the biggest gig economy platforms and one of biggest e-commerce platforms in the world.

“You won’t find a lot of situations where you have the ability to write almost a ‘greenfield’ code and then, immediately, it goes into a production environment and can be used by one of the biggest companies in the world, in order to provide services to their own consumers,” he said.

At Gemalto, a Netherlands-based global digital security company, acqui-hiring is often considered as the most efficient way to grow the workforce.

“It’s not that easy to attract talent, in the sense that Gemalto is a business-to-business company, so our name is not that visible,” Hakan Nordfjell, head of digital banking at Gemalto, told Bank Innovation.

He said acquiring companies has been a way of “getting new blood and new talents” in the door and “driving the company forward.”

“Pure recruiting is tough,” Nordfjell said. “When we acquire, we try to cross-fertilize — so that people come into our environment and get inspired — because you have a different tempo and a different mindset when you work in a smaller company. That’s something we try to learn from, too.”

Global payments fintech Flywire focuses on employee culture first and foremost, CEO Mike Massaro told Bank Innovation. He said his Boston-based firm has the added advantage of being “very much a global team,” with about 350 people of 30 nationalities in 10 offices around the world.

“If you’re looking for that experience, if you’re looking for opportunities to move around the world and experience global problems, and to help improve the way in which money moves globally, we differentiate a lot there,” he said. “That’s hard for a lot of companies to compete with if it’s not core to their culture.”

Phill Rosen, co-founder and CEO of Even Financial, an API-powered recommendation platform firm, recently told Bank Innovation being a New York City-based fintech startup has its perks and challenges.

“New York City has a tremendous pool of tech talent, but it’s very competitive to get them to join,” he said. “We focus on engineers who have computer science degrees, but they don’t necessarily have to have 10 years of experience. We really like looking to regional technical schools, as well as potentially hiring out of some of the banks who have maybe a more traditional culture than we do.”

Rosen said Even retains tech talent by providing “the opportunity to work on something that’s really innovative and has tremendous potential to grow.” The company had a retention rate of 100% through 2018, he said.

“Nobody’s quit, and that’s because it’s a great environment, but it’s also really exciting,” he said.

Join us at Bank Innovation Ignite 2019, March 11-12 at the Hyatt Olive 8 in Seattle. Register here.