(TNS) — Each time you swipe a credit card, tap to pay or pay for an online order, it’s likely the technology of Georgia-based companies helps to get your dollars to the merchant.
Financial technology is the backbone of commerce and a pillar of Georgia’s economy, and it’s one that could be disrupted by artificial intelligence. AI disruption is in some ways overblown and also understated, experts said recently at Atlanta’s Fintech South, a conference of industry leaders.
AI isn’t erasing jobs overnight, but industry observers say it is redefining the skills needed, especially at the entry level.
AI now handles work that used to break in new hires. This is reducing the traditional career on-ramps just as many current fintech workers age into senior roles. Executives at Georgia’s fintech companies say they are rising to the challenge by building an employer education pipeline that builds skills AI can’t replace.
This is an important issue for Georgia to get right. Fintech employers account for more than 42,000 Georgia jobs across more than 200 companies, according to the Technology Association of Georgia’s 2024-25 impact report. Georgia is such a powerhouse in the payments world that the state is known internationally as “Transaction Alley” with Atlanta sitting at its heart.
Executives at Fintech South said two homegrown educational efforts are driving Georgia’s payments industry forward: the Georgia Fintech Academy and an initiative of the Technology Association of Georgia known as the Educational Collaborative, or TAG-Ed.
“AI is shifting how careers begin, but it is also creating new opportunities,” said Laura Gibson-Lamothe, executive director of the academy.
The Georgia Fintech Academy, a partnership between the University System of Georgia and some of the world’s largest payments companies, says it has served more than 10,000 students and career changers since it was established in 2018.
TAG-Ed, launched in 2002, has provided tech education programs for K-12 students and training programs for existing workers — serving tens of thousands of Georgians in the last 23 years. Both organizations fill key roles in educating the next generation of Georgia tech talent.
The question remains: Can the state’s talent engine keep up with the pace or will the changes outrun the syllabus?
AI’S INFLUENCE
AI is having a disproportionate impact on early talent. Tech workers in the first one to three years of their careers have seen sharp employment declines, according to a Stanford University paper from August titled “Canaries in the Coal Mine?”
Software engineering, the foundation of fintech, has been hit hardest, with a 20 percent decline in employment since 2022. This comes as firms are thinning out entry-level hiring in favor of AI tools.
Fintech companies use technology to support or enable banking, payments and other financial services. Like other high-tech sectors, fintech has rapidly adopted AI to automate support and back-office finance, accelerate software development and improve fraud management.
As career on-ramps like back-office functions and support are automated and the existing workforce ages, legacy fintechs are left with a gap: They have plenty of tenured workers but too little early talent.
Traditional education programs, however, have struggled to keep pace. Larry Williams, president of TAG, put the issue simply: “The industry is evolving faster than the syllabus can be written. What’s going on today goes beyond innovation — it’s a revolution. AI is going to be a permanent and systemwide change.”
In the face of this change, Georgia’s fintechs have an answer — one they’ve been working on for more than a decade.
REVOLUTIONIZING EDUCATION
In early 2015, American Transaction Processors Coalition, an industry group representing companies like Fiserv, Deluxe and ACI Worldwide, approached the University System of Georgia with an urgent request.
“They came into our offices and said they needed 10,000 new hires to meet the current market demand,” said Art Ressco, then chief innovation officer of the state’s university system, and James Senn, managing director emeritus of Georgia State University’s Center for Global Business Leadership.
The American Transaction Processors Coalition, University System of Georgia and Georgia State spent three years identifying the real-world skills students needed and the best ways to get them experience in the industry. The result was the Georgia Fintech Academy and a series of courses built on industry collaboration and connections.
The Stanford paper that rang the alarm on early-career hiring delivered a solution: real-world experience.
“Codified” information in textbooks can be learned by AI and used to replace some early-career roles — think things like code reviews, translating or rules-based decision-making. Roles that rely on “tacit” or experiential knowledge are in higher demand than ever, because AI augments rather than replaces the work, the study said.
Georgia Fintech Academy delivers experiential learning for university students through capstone projects, internships and startup pitch competitions. TAG-Ed’s mission is to further develop the skills of current workers and prepare the next generation of talent.
In March 2024, TAG-Ed expanded its program by launching a registered-apprenticeship program to expand opportunities to those currently in the workforce — whether or not they have a college degree.
Some differences, experts say, between Georgia Fintech Academy or TAG-Ed and similar education programs are the number of institutions and scale of direct industry involvement. Typical university-industry partnerships are focused on a single institution and employer, such as the one between University of Maryland and Northrop Grumman.
Rather than being tied to a single school or employer, Georgia Fintech Academy spans 26 universities across the state and includes partnerships with more than 30 fintech employers in Georgia.
Projects, speaker series and employer-led training programs set Georgia’s fintech education apart from normal degree and certificate programs.
One company, InComm Payments, has an eight-week training program at its Go Studio innovation hub. InComm is one of the companies powering gift and reloadable debit cards and is based in downtown Atlanta.
Within its headquarters, Go Studio provides hands-on training for Georgia Fintech Academy through a partnership established last fall. Over the course of the program, students to learn innovation methodologies such as problem framing, design thinking and more.
Georgia Fintech Academy, TAG-Ed and similar programs work because of the high density of fintech talent and collaborative community. As the heart of “Transaction Alley,” Atlanta continues to attract both incumbents and startups, from Block (owner of Square and Cash App) and Stripe to the likes of Yaspa and Lulo.
Lulo is a fintech helping thousands of Georgia families put more food on the table from the federal supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children, known as WIC. Sarah Stellwag, co-founder of Lulo who recently relocated to Atlanta, said, “The customer demand brought me to Georgia, but the support of the fintech community convinced me to stay.”
SO WHY FOCUS ON THIS NOW?
More than 7 out of 10 of people fear AI will put too many people permanently out of work, according to an August Reuters/Ipsos poll. This fear is beginning to become a reality for white-collar work like fintech.
However, those with tacit knowledge and experiential learning have proved most resilient, experts say. They’re best equipped to turn AI from a threat into a tool.
“Tacit, experiential skills are exactly what the Georgia Fintech Academy and TAG-Ed are designed to provide,” explained Resseco, who’s now working at the intersection of AI and skill development.
AI is also providing new opportunities for people to enter the industry.
New on-ramps like compliance, risk, data ethics and AI governance have emerged within the fintech industry and will result in jobs for humans to fill. While not every student, intern or apprentice ends up in fintech, Georgia Fintech Academy has placed more than 4,000 of its students in fintech roles.
©2025 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.