The future of fintech is female

Fin­tech is a brave new world of cre­ativ­i­ty and explo­ration, but you wouldn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly know that by look­ing at the boards of most lead­ing insti­tu­tions in the sec­tor. Accord­ing to a 2018 LendIt sur­vey, only 37 per cent of fin­tech employ­ees are female, with rep­re­sen­ta­tion drop­ping to just 19 per cent at C‑suite lev­el. Although the num­ber of women in fin­tech is steadi­ly improv­ing, there remain sys­temic flaws in the sys­tems that cre­ate bar­ri­ers to gen­der diver­si­ty and hin­der women’s rise to the top.

Deep-root­ed chal­lenges and bias­es per­sist, despite strong evi­dence of the val­ue women bring to busi­ness­es. The Cred­it Suisse Research Insti­tute reports that com­pa­nies with at least one woman on the board per­form 26 per cent bet­ter than those with male-only boards, while Forbes found female entre­pre­neurs gen­er­ate 20 per cent more rev­enue than their male coun­ter­parts, despite receiv­ing 50 per cent less ven­ture cap­i­tal fund­ing.

Here, four world-lead­ing female pio­neers of finan­cial tech­nol­o­gy, who are help­ing to open doors for the next gen­er­a­tion of female founders and exec­u­tives, share their insights. They dis­cuss the chal­lenges they’ve faced, the need for bet­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tion and their hopes for a gen­der-neu­tral future in finan­cial ser­vices.

Anne Boden, Starling Bank, UK

Her love for tech­nol­o­gy showed itself at the age of four, when Anne Boden’s steel­work­er father bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder for her birth­day. Although not a typ­i­cal toy for a tod­dler, the bulky piece of kit, inno­v­a­tive in its day, sparked a life-long inter­est in machines in the lit­tle girl from South Wales.

After a 30-year career in bank­ing at some of the world’s best-known finan­cial heavy­weights, includ­ing Lloyds TSB, Allied Irish Bank and the Roy­al Bank of Scot­land, Boden’s tech cre­den­tials came into their own. Find­ing her­self ashamed to be a banker when it was clear the 2008 glob­al finan­cial cri­sis had done noth­ing to cure the industry’s ills, she start­ed Star­ling Bank in 2014 and began build­ing wealth man­age­ment apps from scratch.

While she is proud that 42 per cent of the exec­u­tive team and 40 per cent of board mem­bers at Star­ling are women, she says the male-dom­i­nat­ed demo­graph­ic she start­ed out in is yet to see sig­nif­i­cant dis­rup­tion. “Women don’t see them­selves in an indus­try that’s full of men, so why would they want to join it?” she asks. “I know I don’t look like a fin­tech leader, so I always try to make noise about it.”

This com­pul­sion to bang the drum comes after a life­time of being told to “tone it down” by naysay­ers who cau­tioned Boden that ambi­tious women in finance would only become frus­trat­ed as they reached their inevitable lim­its. “I’m glad that advice went over my head, because if it didn’t, I wouldn’t have built a bank,” says the right­ful queen of UK fin­tech.

As a female founder, Boden was under­es­ti­mat­ed once again when try­ing to secure fund­ing for Star­ling in Sil­i­con Val­ley. “Investors couldn’t see past their idea of what a founder looked like,” she says. “They were only inter­est­ed in back­ing white men in gilets with beards who fit the start­up stereo­type.” But such knock-backs only helped strength­en Boden’s resolve. “I worked towards my goal, not only to help improve people’s finan­cial well­ness, but also to show them that a woman can suc­ceed in a male-dom­i­nat­ed indus­try,” she says.

While Boden insists women in fin­tech still find them­selves with more to prove, she believes the indus­try is slow­ly wak­ing up to the ben­e­fits of gen­der diver­si­ty. “We’ve start­ed to have the con­ver­sa­tions, so now we need to do the work,” she says. “As long as we cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that’s wel­com­ing, I’m cer­tain fin­tech com­pa­nies can change for the bet­ter.”

I know I don’t look like a fin­tech leader, so I always try to make noise about it

Anna Maj, World Business Angel Investment Forum,

Poland 

This female fin­tech cham­pi­on likes to say she was a woman in fin­tech before the term was even invent­ed. Join­ing Cit­i­group at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um, Anna Maj went straight into the new­ly cre­at­ed sec­tor of finan­cial tech­nol­o­gy, where she began scratch­ing the sur­face of inter­net bank­ing, account aggre­ga­tion and open bank­ing.

While there were sev­er­al women assigned to non-man­age­r­i­al roles with­in the bank, she came across very few fur­ther up the cor­po­rate lad­der, espe­cial­ly with­in her tech-focused sec­tor. “It would often hap­pen that I would be sit­ting in a meet­ing with 20 peo­ple and realise I was the only woman there,” she says. “At first, I didn’t even recog­nise there were gen­der issues because it was a dai­ly rou­tine for me, but as time went by and I was pro­mot­ed, I found being the only woman had its chal­lenges.”

Maj claims that rather than being lim­it­ed by the “glass ceil­ing”, she repeat­ed­ly found her­self fac­ing off against a “glass cliff”, a metaphor for the way she feels women in tech are test­ed to a greater degree than men and pushed out if they fail to deliv­er. “This is a bat­tle­field for many women,” she says. 

Nav­i­gat­ing such bat­tle­fields seems to have bestowed her with a war­rior-like men­tal­i­ty, how­ev­er, spurring her on rather than cut­ting her down. A high achiev­er in the extreme, Maj start­ed school a year ear­li­er than the oth­er chil­dren in her home­town of War­saw. She cur­rent­ly works as a senior lec­tur­er at the Cen­ter for Finan­cial Train­ing & Edu­ca­tion, a sen­a­tor at the WBAF Angel Invest­ment Fund and a jury mem­ber at the Euro­pean Inno­va­tion Coun­cil.

She has an MBA, is fin­ish­ing up a PhD, speaks five lan­guages, has pub­lished two books, and last year fea­tured in the Women in Fin­Tech Pow­erlist, and was among the Top 25 Women Lead­ers in Finan­cial Tech­nol­o­gy.

Part of the trans­for­ma­tion gen­er­a­tion that grew up as the East­ern Bloc’s post-com­mu­nist coun­tries began open­ing to the world, Maj has nev­er faced the dilem­ma of hav­ing to choose between her career and per­son­al life, decid­ing in her 30s that her pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment and free­dom trumped hav­ing a fam­i­ly. “It very much depends, as every­body knows, on how you define suc­cess, what are your val­ues and what you want out of life,” she says. “Every life is dif­fer­ent.”

Maj wel­comes the recent wave of pos­i­tive ini­tia­tives sup­port­ing female lead­ers in fin­tech com­pa­nies, but says a change in the glob­al mind­set must take place before minori­ties of all kinds can achieve gen­uine rep­re­sen­ta­tion and shake off the shack­les of imposter syn­drome. “Women for women only doesn’t make sense in the long run,” she says. “We need the entire pop­u­la­tion to sup­port diver­si­ty, not only in terms of gen­der, but also age, back­ground, cul­ture, eth­nic­i­ty, skills and con­fi­dence. It’s by con­nect­ing all these things we can cre­ate a col­lab­o­ra­tive ecosys­tem that’s best for busi­ness.” 

Women for women only doesn’t make sense in the long run. We need the entire pop­u­la­tion to sup­port diver­si­ty

Kahina van Dyke, Standard Chartered, Singapore

From a fam­i­ly of rule break­ers, Kahi­na van Dyke’s par­ents met at a civ­il rights protest in the late-1960s, where her Black father was march­ing and her white moth­er was report­ing. At a time of great social unrest and deep racial divi­sions, they raised five chil­dren in north­ern New York State, teach­ing them all to stand up and be count­ed. “I think when you’re raised by two peo­ple who go against the odds and have the belief that just because some­thing is legal it doesn’t mean it’s right, you have the idea of con­struc­tive­ly chal­leng­ing the assump­tions of the sys­tem,” says van Dyke. 

This year, start­ing a new role in dig­i­tal chan­nels and data analy­sis with Stan­dard Char­tered in Sin­ga­pore, van Dyke’s path to becom­ing a fin­tech leader almost mir­rors that of Anna Maj, begin­ning with Cit­i­group in 1999, when banks were just start­ing to explore “this ground-break­ing new thing called the inter­net”. Also sim­i­lar to Maj, she found that while her team includ­ed plen­ty of women at the start, as she pro­gressed in her career, through posi­tions with Face­book, Mas­ter­card and Rip­ple, diver­si­ty, both in terms of gen­der and eth­nic­i­ty, became hard­er to find.

Point­ed­ly announc­ing “Good morn­ing, gen­tle­men”, when enter­ing a board­room full of men helped her feel she was both acknowl­edg­ing and own­ing the dis­par­i­ty, as did swap­ping her pin-striped trouser­suits for dress­es once she felt con­fi­dent enough to do so. “I remem­ber that being a very free­ing thing as I hit my 30s and my stride. I realised, yes, I’m the only woman, but actu­al­ly my fem­i­nin­i­ty is my unique qual­i­ty and strength,” she says.

Moti­vat­ed by her par­ents’ con­vic­tion that she should use her bless­ings to help oth­ers, van Dyke worked tire­less­ly to out­per­form her male col­leagues to pave the way for the next gen­er­a­tion of non-tra­di­tion­al can­di­dates. Run­ning a glob­al team by the time she had her twins, she hoped her work eth­ic and senior­i­ty would shield her from the sidelin­ing some of her friends had faced when start­ing fam­i­lies ear­li­er in their careers. Nonethe­less, offers of mov­ing into less inten­sive roles and ques­tions about who was look­ing after her chil­dren were com­mon­place. “I nev­er saw my male col­leagues get asked those ques­tions,” she says. “Even the ones that had six kids.”

As bank­ing con­tin­ues to evolve into a more col­lab­o­ra­tive and inte­grat­ed enti­ty, how­ev­er, van Dyke sees an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the devel­op­ment of new lead­er­ship and work­ing mod­els that she hopes will ulti­mate­ly result in more women in fin­tech. “In ten years, our C‑suites are not going to look the same,” she says. “I’m real­ly excit­ed about that, but we all have to push towards it. Those who get it right are going to win and those who don’t are going to be dinosaurs.”

Yes, I’m the only woman, but actu­al­ly my fem­i­nin­i­ty is my unique qual­i­ty and strength

Cristina Junqueira, Nubank, Brazil

When Nubank, one of a new breed of chal­lenger banks, received a ten­fold-uni­corn val­u­a­tion in 2018, it became the first com­pa­ny in the world with a female co-founder to reach the $10-bil­lion mile­stone. The woman with that cred­it to her name is Cristi­na Jun­queira, a gift­ed and ide­al­is­tic Brazil­ian engi­neer who, along with her part­ners, Colom­bian David Vélez and Amer­i­can Edward Wible, has dis­rupt­ed the insti­tu­tion­al­ly dys­func­tion­al and com­pla­cent bank­ing land­scape in Latin Amer­i­ca.

Nubank, now the world’s largest dig­i­tal bank­ing start­up with more than 30 mil­lion cus­tomers, oper­ates exclu­sive­ly online, pro­vid­ing finan­cial ser­vices that strive to be sim­ple, human and trans­par­ent.

After a degree in indus­tri­al engi­neer­ing and a mas­ters in eco­nom­ic and finan­cial mod­el­ling, Jun­queira found her­self ris­ing quick­ly through the ranks of Uni­ban­co, the largest pri­vate bank­ing group in Brazil. With no female role mod­els in posi­tions above her, she was advised to look and act more like her male col­leagues, and com­plied by restrict­ing her wardrobe to gen­der-neu­tral ensem­bles.

“I’ve always strived to have a pro­tag­o­nist atti­tude in my career, so I tack­led this point with the same dis­ci­pline I tack­led every oth­er piece of devel­op­ment feed­back I received. But it was sad to see that the one thing they cared about was how I looked as opposed to the impact I was able to dri­ve with my work,” she says.

This, along with the con­stant rejec­tion of her pro­pos­als to make finan­cial ser­vices more trans­par­ent and afford­able, left Jun­queira deflat­ed and dis­il­lu­sioned. Decid­ing she was “done mak­ing rich peo­ple rich­er”, she left the bank­ing behe­moth and launched Nubank after stum­bling across a meet­ing of ideals and exper­tise with her fel­low co-founders.

Jun­queira has two daugh­ters, the first of whom was born as Nubank received its series‑A financ­ing round. Sign­ing the deal from her hos­pi­tal bed the day before the birth and back on the phone to clients the day after, she affec­tion­ate­ly refers to the bank and her first-born as twins, and unashamed­ly admits her work and her fam­i­ly are of equal impor­tance.

She believes the flex­i­bil­i­ty and cre­ativ­i­ty of fin­tech com­pa­nies is more attrac­tive to and sup­port­ive of women, and is proud to boast a pay­roll that is 43 per cent female, includ­ing many in lead­er­ship and C‑level posi­tions. With in-house ini­tia­tives such as “Yes, She Codes”, Nubank hopes to see more women in fin­tech in the future which, Jun­queira expects, will lead to bet­ter prod­ucts. “If we only have a small group of peo­ple who look alike and think alike cre­at­ing the finan­cial ser­vices of the future, it’s like­ly those prod­ucts will only fit the needs of peo­ple sim­i­lar to them,” she con­cludes.

If we only have a small group of peo­ple who look and think alike cre­at­ing the finan­cial ser­vices of the future, it’s like­ly those prod­ucts will only fit the needs of peo­ple sim­i­lar to them

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