There are thousands of unexplored opportunities in the financial sector that are begging to be taken by startups. If you have a clear value proposition, then selling into the financial market is easy. This is especially true if the product you're building helps your customers make money.
Every major investment bank has thousands of developers on payroll building internal systems, they'd love to just be able to buy off-the-shelf solutions that solve their problems instead.
If your product is good than your customers aren't going to be worried about you going out of business, because they know someone will acquire you before that happens. They're more likely to be worried that one of their competitors will buy you.
Sure you need to be more active in doing sales, but because the financial community is relatively tight-knit this is relatively easy. A lot of the time it's basically calling your old colleagues and getting them to make an introduction for you.
When I left the last investment bank I was working for to start my startup, the head of the trading desk pulled me aside and said "if you're building something in our space, come and pitch us first". That's the nature of the sector, everyone wants to get the cool new tech that's going to give them the edge on the market.
Banks and Financial tech firms also tend to be very active when it comes to acquisitions. It's considered a standard way to get exclusive use of a technology or to expand your firm.
Not true. Financial clients spend BIG and invest often in cutting edge tech to develop & advance their quantitative trading and high frequency trading businesses.
The full stack from cables to networking to application needs to be as good as it can be. Your solving problems of big data, real time and it MUST work. Financial tech people are some of THE best in the business, solving some of the most challenging problems out there.
It's probably true to say that some finance institutions are practically software houses - with some of the big IB's employing more tech people than they do business function.
Like others have said, there are huge opportunities in finance, but you need some serious tech to compete.
If anyone would like to talk more about this please get in touch with us (or just come see me at London Hacker News events, which we sponsor).
Sometime there's a good reason why web-startups are tiny part of the European ecosystems. Even if you want to have more, the market doesn't necessarily agree with your personal point of view (I don't mean to criticize you, I'm just pointing out that there might be bias in your view)