Women are making their mark on the male-dominated fintech industry with innovative technology and creative thinking. From powerful executives to free thinking startups, women in fintech are showcasing new solutions that are sparking change throughout the industry. Financial Technology Today has compiled some of the top stories surrounding women in fintech. Read on to learn more.
Women are driving rapid development and user-centric product design throughout the fintech industry. Bloomberg recently held a Women in Fintech panel discussion where panelists spoke about women pushing for more personalized product design. These products are developed with the consumer in mind throughout the process and result in a customer-centric end product that engages users.
Having homogenous teams, “is not a really good way to solve problems,” said Ingrid Busson-Hall, senior director of financial regulation at PayPal. “If you have people who all look the same and think the same, you’re going to define the problem one way and then you’re going to solve it in a really confined way.”
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Jennifer Fitzgerald, the CEO, and Founder of Policygenius raised over $50 million dollars for her fintech company. Policygenius, an online insurance marketplace, went through major changes under Fitzgerald that paid off, seven times their past monthly revenues, to be exact. In the past years, Policygenius began brand building and increased both outdoor and digital advertising. Before Fitzgerald was a fintech powerhouse, she spent years working for government agencies learning about finance and technology.
“I spent two years working for the municipal government. Honduras was a very poor country, and I had to determine how to raise tax revenue by building a tax management system. It was a very entrepreneurial experience. I was on my own, using a spreadsheet and a database to make a difference,” said Fitzgerald.
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Revolut is offering free coding classes for women to improve diversity in the fintech industry. The company is looking to hire new engineers in hopes of expanding globally. Currently, Revolut has a 60-40 gender split in the office with men outnumbering women. Their engineering team is mostly men which they hope to change with this free class.
“While a lot of tech companies talk a good game about how important gender balance is to them, we’ve identified our own imbalance within our engineering teams and are taking action ourselves to help tackle this issue,” said Nikolay Storonsky, founder and CEO of Revolut.
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Square, a mobile payments company founded in 2009, is backed by Sarah Friar, their CFO who took the company public. Friar wanted to work for a company that had a purpose, Square’s mission of economic empowerment for small business spoke to Friar and she joined the company in 2012. Surprisingly, half of Square’s management team are women and about 70 percent of the business reports to a woman.
‘I did engineering internships while I was at uni but I came away thinking: “There’s no-one at the top who looks like me. How will I ever be a success?” It was incredibly male-dominated and there were no female role models for me to look up to,” said Friar. “Companies need to make sure they’re not just recruiting women in, but helping them to stay on and move up. There’s so much research out there to show that companies with diverse teams make better business decisions and have better financial returns.”
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