Research Analyst: Fintech

Who Are We

ARK is a global investment manager focused solely on investing in disruptive innovation that is changing the way the world works. Majority Owner, Catherine D. Wood, founded ARK in 2014 on the belief that innovation is key to growth. Rooted in over 40 years of experience, ARK aims to identify large-scale investment opportunities in the public markets resulting from technological innovations centered around genome sequencing, robotics, artificial intelligence, energy storage, and blockchain technology. 

ARK manages and sub advises long-only global public and private equity portfolios across a variety of investment vehicles, including a suite of exchange traded funds (ETFs), mutual funds, and separately managed accounts. Our investments are backed by an open research ecosystem designed to identify innovations with the potential for long-term growth. As of June 30, 2023, the firm managed approximately $25.0 billion in assets under management. 

ARK is committed to ensuring equal employment opportunities for all employees and strives to maintain an environment free of discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, national origin, ancestry, age, disability, genetic information, military or veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship, or any other protected category or characteristics as defined by federal, state, or local laws. If you want to learn more, please visit our “Philosophy” page to understand how ARK differs from traditional investment firms. We also encourage you to meet the ARK team and follow us on X. 

*This is a Full-Time position in our St. Petersburg, FL Corporate Office.

What You Will Do:

We expect you to perform high quality work to support our Fintech Innovation strategies. You will learn about and conduct original analysis on innovative technologies, while supporting and providing coverage of companies in your research area. Your work will directly inform our investment decisions, so your success is our success.

Having onboarded billions of consumers and millions of merchants, digital wallets are transforming the economics associated with traditional payment transactions. ARK research suggests that digital wallets can facilitate more than $40 trillion in total processed volume in 2030, more than double the $19 trillion logged in 2022. Despite their growth and scale, digital wallets and related fintech innovations are just starting to disrupt the legacy financial institutions and intermediaries. That’s where you come in. 

Your Responsibilities:

• Support ARK’s portfolios by combining top-down thematic research and bottom-up fundamental analysis to identify investment opportunities. 
• Work closely with ARK’s Next Generation Internet and Fintech team to identify innovative technologies, model the growth rates and sizes of new markets, estimate unit economics, and assess the competitive landscape. 
• Research and identify both public and private companies that are the leaders, enablers, and beneficiaries of disruptive innovation, focused on the fields of payments, digital wallets, blockchain, and other related financial technologies. Form investment recommendations based on your research to share with ARK’s Analysts, Directors of Research, Chief Futurist, and ARK’s CEO & CIO. 
• Meet experts on your research topics through Twitter, conferences, ARK calls, or other channels and engage with them, learn from them, and share ARK’s published research. 
• Actively gather feedback and publish your work through Twitter and other online platforms and mediums, including authoring thought-leadership blogs and whitepapers relevant to fintech innovation. 

Who You Are:

• You have several years of experience investing in or working directly with companies driving innovation in digital wallets, payments, blockchain technology, and other related financial technologies.   
• You’re a technological expert. You believe in the power of technology to create a better future for humanity. You want to play a role in realizing and supporting that future. 
• You’re driven by your innate curiosity. You likely found ARK because your interests and ours converged. Because you follow the industry as closely as we do, you’re already quite knowledgeable about one or more of the technologies we cover. 
• You enjoy quantitative analysis—collecting data, transforming it, and using it as the backbone of your forecasts. You don’t have to be a finance wizard, just have a willingness to learn on the fly. 
• You’re a fabulous storyteller. You combine quantitative analysis, historical analogies, and cultural and user-centric considerations to form compelling narratives about how companies and technologies could evolve. 
• You’re an independent thinker. You probably diverge from the mainstream, but you aren’t merely contrarian. You are interested only in finding the truth. Your strong conviction is balanced by a healthy dose of humility. 
• You have decent programming or data science chops. You can use scripting languages and analytics tools to scrape, analyze, visualize, and communicate data. 
• You’re not just an analyst, you’re a builder. You want to find ways to scale ARK as a company, guide its culture, and push us in new directions we’ve not yet considered. 
• You get things done. It doesn’t matter if you need to dive down a rabbit hole to learn a new subject or find an out-of-print book in the corner of the internet, you get excited by the challenge and know how to move the ball forward.

How to Apply:

The best way for us to get to know you is through examples of your work. This may be a blog, presentation, podcast, newsletter, or tweetstorm. If you don’t have an example of your work, we’d encourage you to create one. Please also tell us about yourself, why you want to work at ARK, and tell us about a technology that you are interested in and why it is interesting.