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Designing a Better Banking Experience

designing-a-better-banking-experience

This week at Money20/20 in Las Vegas I spent some time behind the scenes at Capital One to see how they are using technology, innovation, and design to create a better banking experience.

I sat down with Scott Zimmer, Capital One’s Global Head of Design, to focus on how design is taking on a growing role in banking. He describes himself as a “Disney-bred creative, someone who’s driven to create”. Not exactly a common bio quote for most bankers, but one that may grow more familiar as design takes an increasingly important role in the industry.

“There’s a pretty compelling story in banking, and the things we do for people matter to people on a human level,” says Zimmer, “and in the design community, that’s what designers were born to do.”

Listen to the interview here:

Design is about a lot more than making things look pretty. It’s about making things work better. Technology has been a democratizing force across so many industries, and banking is no exception. Customers have more choices than ever, and those choices now include products, services and experiences that are often far superior than the you’ll-take-what-we-make era that prevailed for so long.

I have heard a lot of bankers proclaim their desire to make their branches more like Apple stores, but for too many of them that desire begins and ends with the clean visual aesthetic. The effectiveness of the design of the Apple store that makes it so successful goes far deeper than that. Zimmer agrees, “Steve (Jobs) was famous for saying ‘design is really how something works’, and what’s interesting about the Apple store in all its starkness, is they simplified it, to make it work better.”

The business case for beautiful products and compelling customer experiences is a tough one for most boards and executives to get their hands around. I know this firsthand from my work helping some of them with their strategic planning, as they fret about making big bets that might not payoff. A good design process involves a ‘test and learn’ approach that is well known to any fintech entrepreneurs following lean startup principles. It’s an approach that banks should be using in more of their business decisions.

As Zimmer puts it: “We try to avoid failing at scale”

Scott Zimmer – Global Head of Design, Capital One

Las Vegas is an appropriate setting for using a poker analogy to describe the advantages of this approach (blackjack works too). Rather than pushing all of their chips to the center of the table and declaring “all in” as the first cards are dealt, the savvy player makes small bets and only increases them until the cards are in their favor.

“It’s the thing that has transitioned product development dramatically”, says Zimmer, “in days past you might have made two, three big bets a year, and now, any team that’s working in this collaborative, iterative fashion can be making sixty, seventy bets at one time, but with minimal investment.”

Zimmer and his team have brought this iterative test and learn approach inside the organization too. They’ve built user labs to test ideas with customers much earlier, and this gives them better insights into what’s working and what’s not much sooner. He contrasts that approach with the typical big meeting going over a PowerPoint presentation that someone has worked on internally for weeks. That approach can cause teams to be defensive about their hard work instead of working through the options more collaboratively with more early contact with customers.

The future of design is evolving beyond spaces, products and services. Zimmer also talked about the challenge of designing for voice with the Capital One skill for Amazon Echo, with a team focused on conversation design “obsessing around the humanity that has to come through in an interaction and what the word choices are”. That work is continuing with the release of an update to the skill called “How Much Did I Spend?” that was built with a natural language query, “as though you are talking with your money”.

Zimmer sees parallels between financial health and physical health, and he thinks software and good design can help us to set goals and achieve them. “The ability to leverage software’s capability to do that is this new era that’s upon us of creating new products and services. I think design plays a huge role, and there’s a bright future ahead.”

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Thanks to Capital One for sponsoring these posts and podcasts and for providing access to their team, but all of the opinions expressed are still mine, all mine. For more information about Capital One, visit www.CapitalOne.com

Fear and Coding in Las Vegas

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Like so many of the the fintech flock, I am about to make my annual Fall migration to Las Vegas for the Money20/20 conference. I am looking ahead to what I hope to see there, which is how fintech is becoming more and more embedded into customer experiences and customer expectations, and how financial institutions are using fintech as a differentiator. The Capgemini/EFMA World Retail Banking Report surveyed 14,000 consumers worldwide and found that nearly two-thirds said they were the customer of at least one fintech company.

I am also reflecting back on the other banking and fintech events that I’ve been to over the last couple of months— Finovate and Next Money in New York, Sibos in Geneva, BAI Beacon and the Fintech Stage in Chicago, and keynoting at three different banking conferences with groups from Massachusetts, Missouri, and half the country with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines. Plus scores of private meetings with bank and fintech executives along the way.

Besides a digital wallet full of frequent flyer miles and a backpack full of Hudson News and Cinnabon sales receipts for my accountant, the main thing that I picked up in my travels is that my industry innovation maturity map of Leaders, Learners and Laggards is evolving, but still valid.

Leaders, Learners and Laggards Revisited

When I developed the maturity map a coupIe of years ago, I defined financial institutions that were Innovation Leaders as those that prioritize innovation as a necessary business activity and support it top-down, bottom-up, inside-out and outside-in. At this stage of evolution I am seeing another difference from Leaders. They also see fintech as a force for redefining business models and improving customer experience.

The small group of Learners in the middle is growing bigger, as more banks are realizing the need to keep up in this era of digital disruption. The same Capgemini/EFMA report also surveyed 140 industry executives around the world and found that 90% of banking executives believe that the pace of change is increasing the need to innovate, and 65.3% said that they viewed fintech firms as potential partners.

I have talked with a lot of Learners over the past few months, and they definitely see the potential for partnering with fintech firms, but they are are finding it challenging to see results quickly, partially because bankers and fintech entrepreneurs seem to come from different planets. They also continue to be challenged in finding the necessary internal resources and expertise since many cannot afford dedicated full-time innovation teams. Most are trying to make due with what I call “And-I’s”, employees with the words “and innovation” tacked onto their existing job title and full time job duties.

My original definition of Laggards was primarily marked by ignorance; executive teams operating with tunnel vision around a narrow definition of competition limited to just their peer group of similar institutions. My recent experiences and conversations tell me that ignorance is now supplemented with an unhealthy dose of denial as they begin to negotiate their own fintech grief cycle.

Laggards think they are “partnering with fintechs” because they have a few technology vendors and a procurement process. They also are much more likely to view fintech as merely opportunities to reduce costs, rather than also the ability to drive better customer experiences.

Spotlight on Capital One

I’ll be talking to a lot of financial institutions and fintechs this week at Money20/20, but I will be spending some extra time with some of the Leaders at Capital One. In upcoming posts I will interview Tom Poole, Managing Vice President of Mobile Commerce for Capital One about mobile payments and integrated commerce, and Naveed Anwar, their Managing Vice President for Platform, Strategic Integrations & Community about the “platformification” of banking and how they are working with fintechs.

I will also be recording these interviews for special episodes of Breaking Banks, the world’s first global fintech podcast. By the way, it was recently announced that Breaking Banks is now the number one business show on the VoiceAmerica network, with over 2.2 million total listeners in over 100 countries.

So follow along as I report this week from Money20/20 in Las Vegas.

Thanks to Capital One for sponsoring these posts and podcasts and for providing access to their team, but all of the opinions expressed are still mine, all mine. To learn more about Capital One, visit www.CapitalOne.com.

Bankers Are From Mars…

It is not news here, or anywhere else, but bankers and fintech entrepreneurs are from different planets.

They are just wired differently.

Just a few years ago, all of the fintech companies wanted to put traditional financial institutions out of business. Disrupt the industry!, they said.

Despite the fact that we still have over 6,000 banks in the U.S. alone, plus a similar number of credit unions, the industry has been disrupted. But acquiring new customers at scale is hard for fintechs, and now the talk is about the value of fintechs partnering with financial institutions, instead of trying to put them out of business.

That’s not necessarily any easier, it’s just a different kind of hard.

Many have focused on technology integration, getting new apps and systems to work with banks’ aging technology infrastructure. The technology-driven nature of many new innovations makes this necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Successful partnerships between fintech companies and financial institutions need go beyond technology integration to address these three elements:

The Three C’s of Bank/Fintech Partnerships

Cost

Building out an internal innovation team is not cheap. That’s why so few FIs have them, and why an increasing number are adding what I call “And-I’s“– employees with “and Innovation” tacked on as an additional responsibility to their existing job titles.

Banks and credit unions are recognizing the increasingly urgent need to update their products and processes to stay relevant with their customers and members, but searching for, evaluating, and vetting potential partners takes a lot of time and money too.

Often overlooked though is the cost of an inefficient innovation process carried out part-time by inexperienced people. Common traps include devoting too much time to planning and defining user requirements, and not enough time actually testing new ideas; and pursuing a random collection of “interesting” projects that do not tie into the organization’s strategic priorities.

Culture

Most senior executives at financial institutions have spent at least part of their career in a lending role, where they needed to make the right decision just about 99% of the time over the long run.

Entrepreneurs experiment with new ideas with an aim to fail fast and fail cheaply, because each iteration and pivot gets them closer to the right answer in the market. The venture capitalists investing in these companies know that close to half (or more) of them will fail.

Most banks and credit unions are not going to be leaders in product innovation, so partnering with more nimble fintech companies makes sense.

But partnering takes more than simple introductions between two different parties with vastly different approaches.

Successful partnership requires FIs to address their own culture to create space inside their own organizations that embraces change. Fintech companies need to understand the conservative nature of their potential FI customers and adjust their sales and development processes accordingly.

Compliance

Fintech companies also need to understand that the ‘move fast and break things‘ ethos of Silicon Valley does not work inside a highly regulated environment.

Every new solution, no matter how cool the technology, has to be compliant if it is going to be used by a traditional financial institution. There is simply no other option.

At the same time, FIs need to recognize that regulation is always going to lag innovation, and they must take a more proactive approach in trying new ideas. The most innovative banks, credit unions, and fintech companies all have proactive relationships with regulators to try new ideas that will still be compliant.

Choosing to sit on the sidelines out of fear is not an effective risk management strategy.

Improving Interplanetary Relations

Yes, bankers and fintech entrpreneurs are from different planets, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide which ones have more inhabitants on Uranus.

It’s time to improve interplanetary relations. Bankers learn about the 5 C’s of credit in their first days of training, maybe it’s time they learned the 3 C’s of Fintech Partnerships.

Rise of the AND-I’s

AND-I's

Make way for the And-I’s.

And-I’s are my name for a new phenomenon I’ve noticed in financial services job titles. “And-I” stands for the words “and innovation” tacked on to the end of existing job titles. Your “Head of Digital Banking” is now “Head of Digital Banking and Innovation“.

Boom. You’re now in the innovation game. No one can accuse you of anything otherwise. It’s right there on the business card. The only thing we love more than acronyms in this business is that kind of git er done, check-the-box process efficiency.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every bank needs a full time Chief Innovation Officer (and no one needs the trousered acronym CHINO that comes with it, but I guess we have to differentiate from our Chief Information Officers and Chief Investment Officers somehow). It’s great to recognize the need to innovate and to give someone the responsibility for making it happen. It’s just that simply tacking it on without a means of support usually does not have much of an impact.

The 3 most common types of And-I’s:

Head of Digital Banking and Innovation

The head of digital banking (who was called the head of online banking just a few years ago) has already been put in charge of digitizing an analog business model, so adding innovation to their job title seems natural.

PRO: The service delivery model of financial services has been on the front lines of the disruption wars, so an effective head of digital banking probably has a pretty good handle on understanding how customers’ needs and preferences are changing.
CON: Often times, the head of digital banking’s domain is limited to consumer retail banking, and usually just the front end of customer interactions, at that. Opportunities may be missed to create better outcomes in other business lines, drive efficiencies from back office processes, or build a sustainable culture of innovation.

Head of Technology and Innovation

The only thing worse than the incorrect and incomplete conflation that ‘innovation = technology’ is its even more misguided cousin, ‘technology = innovation’, even though the two do often co-exist as a matter of necessity.

PRO: A senior technologist who understands how to make things work inside the complex machinery of a bank is definitely a great person to have thinking about implementing better ways of doing things.
CON: Senior technology leaders are under a lot of (understandable) pressure to keep all of the systems running smoothly and reliably, and to continually seek out and destroy any potential security threats. It’s hard to ask that person to spend a lot of time building and testing new concepts with regularity.

Executive Vice President of X and Innovation

If a board and/or CEO have decided that innovation is indeed an act of leadership, they may want to vest a member of the senior leadership team with newly minted innovation powers.

PRO: Any innovation efforts without a serious commitment from senior leadership is doomed to fail. Having someone with the ear of the CEO and board and a direct say in the budgeting process is a good thing.
CON: Even if the appointed senior officer isn’t the type who needs their granddaughter to help them figure out all of those apps on their new iPhone, all of that experience of the grizzled veterans can actually work against them in the innovation process. The pursuit of perfecting best practices can get in the way of discovering the next practices.

The Case for And-I’s

Hiring people with a full time focus on innovation is an expense that most banks cannot afford. The cost of a full-time, senior level Chief Innovation Officer, plus a team of supporting researchers, designers, and technologists can easily be a million dollar a year investment (or more). Plus hoodies. You can’t forget hoodies.
Infusing an imperative to innovate into everyone’s psyche and their job description is a hallmark of the most innovative companies in the world. It shouldn’t be reserved for an anointed few.
Far-flung R&D labs and skunkworks activities disconnected from the core business and its practitioners can be a rabbit hole of unproductive navel-gazing.

How to Make it Work

Use all of these people as a team, plus a few others (just none of these people), to help you build out your innovation team. But put someone in charge. Even if it’s part time, someone has to be the leader of your innovation efforts.
Establish innovation goals. What are the business goals you are trying to achieve? (See: 5 New Years Resolutions for Bank Innovators.)
Create a separate innovation governance and funding structure. Innovation projects can’t be managed like typical BAU (business as usual) projects.
Have the appropriate time horizons. Your typical ROI models, J-curves and break-even analysis don’t always work well when you’re experimenting with something new. (See: 5 Ways to Kill Your Innovation Initiative)
Don’t go it alone. Get some help setting up and running your innovation program, and don’t build everything in-house. Nimble fintech companies can build and release a whole new app in the time it can take for you to assemble the committee members required to sign off its release.

Support your local And-I’s. They need all the help they can get.

The Fintech Grief Cycle for Bankers

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As a few fintech companies like Lending Club, Betterment, and others have run into some rough patches lately, it has been interesting to note some of the reactions, especially amongst bankers (that’s just shorthand, I’m looking at you too, credit union leaders).

Some have taken this news as indication that fintech was just a bubble after all, and it is finally popping.

I think a more pragmatic view is that fintech (and “innovation” in general) has simply moved down from the dizzying heights of the hype curve. That’s a good thing. It’s the natural progression of maturing technologies and sectors. It means that fintech is moving from wild, pie-in-the-sky fantasizing to actual application with customers. Real companies are learning real lessons in the marketplace.

Some will make it and some will not, but technology– financial, and otherwise– will continue to be an increasingly important part of our financial lives. As fintech companies navigate the hype curve, bankers seem to be navigating their own grief cycle about fintech and the need to innovate:

Grief Cycle

The Bankers Fintech Grief Cycle

The first stage is Denial. It is hard to comprehend that the things that have brought us so much success are beginning to be less effective. Denial is a powerful reality-distorting mechanism that can persist for a very long time (and it has). We’ve been doing it this way for years. We’re at the top of our peer group. Financial services are different than just selling books or videos. The industry is too big, too established, too well regulated, too politically protected, too important to the economy, too whatever, to be disrupted. We’re in financial services, and we have technology like a core processing system, some ATMs and a website– we already are a fintech company!

The second stage is Anger. Frustration sets in when reality begins to bevoke harder to deny: This is unfair competition! When are the regulators going to take a look at these companies and smack them back to the real world? I could do more if only I was allowed!

The third stage is Bargaining. Compromise seems like an easier path than change, and we become willing to make trade-offs now that we should’ve made earlier: I know we’re going to have to do something different someday for those millennial (never mind that the oldest of this demographic group are already in their mid-30’s), but we can just stay the course until I retire. Maybe if we just clean up our website a little and update our mobile app (or just come out with one), we’ll be OK. What if we just add the word “innovation” to a couple of our people’s job titles?

The fourth stage is Depression. As the new reality persists in the face of all of the other coping mechanisms, despair sets in. Why bother? The industry just isn’t the same anymore. Maybe it’s just time to sell.

The final stage is Acceptance. The inevitable is finally accepted, and for some, even embraced. You know, beyond the threats, there are actually quite a few opportunities in all of this. Some of these companies have some pretty good ideas, maybe we should work with them instead of fighting against them. This could actually be good for us!

Fintech is the new normal, and the bankers who move from Denial to Acceptance faster and step up their own innovation efforts will reap the benefits in this new era of digital disruption.

Strategic Planning: Stacking the Odds in Your Favor

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It’s midyear already.

Halftime.

Two quarters down and two to go for 2016. For many financial institutions, it’s also the start of the 2017 strategic planning season. That time when boards and senior leadership teams sit down to hash out next year’s budget; working together to set aside silo politics and internecine battles to focus on what’s best for the customers, and the overall enterprise as a result.

Haha– just kidding!

It’s that time when business line leaders are calculating what they need to spend quickly so they don’t lose it in next year’s budget. It’s that time when executives start currying favor and jockeying for position by letting their bosses know how much more worthy their business unit is for additional funding compared to their peers.

As silly as it sounds, it’s all pretty rational behavior, really.

Much of the strategic planning process, especially the budgeting aspects of it, are pretty much a zero-sum game. All of the bottom-up funding requests sent out to frontline leaders from the top of the organization (with varying degrees of sincerity) invariably tally up to far more in expenses and far less in current revenues than what the C-suite has already telegraphed to investors. The resulting negotiations, horse trading, and unsatisfying compromises usually end up with limited resources being spread across the organization like a thin layer of peanut butter. Starving no one, but providing the necessary energy to few.

Lessons from Las Vegas?

Unlike many Wall Street investment bankers and traders, most commercial bank and credit union leaders are inherently risk averse. Las Vegas would seem to provide few practical lessons for the latter group, despite the risk of not taking risk, as I have pointed out before.

But if you’re really serious about reaching a new level of performance, this should really be the time for doubling down on a small number of bets that show promise for outsized returns. That also means taking a few bets off the table if the odds don’t look so good.

Spreading your money around the roulette table seems like a way to hedge your risk, but thanks to the house edge, your expected loss over the long run is a minimum of 5.26%, the same as betting it all on black. Or red.

Moving from House Edge to Player Edge

The only people in Las Vegas who can make money over the long run (besides the house) are blackjack players, but not just any blackjack players– just those who:

Know the odds of every possible bet,
Understand when the odds have shifted in their favor, and
Vary their bets accordingly.

Learning the odds of every possible bet in blackjack is time consuming, but not incredibly difficult. Casinos sell wallet-sized basic strategy cards in their gift shops. But millions of gamblers will ignore them and bet on ‘hunches’, ‘streaks’, and ‘strategies’ more grounded in wishful thinking than in the mathematics of probabilities and statistics.

Understanding when the odds have shifted requires the ability to count cards, a practice made famous in Ben Mezrich’s 2003 book “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions” (later made into the 2008 movie “21”, starring Kevin Spacey).

Counting cards is a way of carefully tracking what happened in the past in order to better predict what might happen in the future. (Predictive analytics, anyone?) This is only true when dealing from a finite number of decks, and not true for a spin of the roulette wheel or the rolling of a pair of dice, where any one outcome is independent of all others. Card counting is not illegal, but it is against the rules of every casino in the world, because it reveals when the house edge has temporarily become the player’s edge.

All of this information can be leveraged to bet more when the odds are in the player’s favor. If most of the cards that have been dealt so far have been smaller values, then there is a greater likelihood that more of the cards to be dealt next will have higher values. This tends to favor the player over the long run (partially because it tends to cause the house to bust more often), so the player should increase their bets.

These factors will almost never combine to create a sure bet, with a win locked in 100%. As in business and in life, blackjack still has a significant amount of randomness involved. All of those tens left in the deck that you hope will allow you to draw to 21 and the dealer to bust her 12, can just as easily do the opposite.

Still, utilizing all of these strategies together can help create more winning sessions, and that’s a good thing.

Turning the Tables in the Boardroom

How can you take the lesson from the blackjack table to the conference table? How can you stack the odds in your favor this strategic planning season?

Know the odds of your existing bets. Are there any slow-growing products or business lines where you know deep down that you are unlikely to grow any faster? Especially if they are not strategically important or do not represent a significant share of ongoing profits?
Understand where the odds have shifted. Are there emerging businesses, products, or services that you’re not investing in today that you should be? Are there outside partners you should be working with to capitalize on new opportunities? Have changes to the competitive landscape exposed new weaknesses you should be shoring up?
Be brave in making your bets. One of your most important jobs as a leader is the allocation of resources. Don’t be fooled by history, legacy, and sunk costs– where is the best place to invest the next dollar? Where should you take bets off the table so you have more to put where the odds are better?

The odds can always move against you in the short run, but taking this approach can help position you to have more wins, and to win more over the long run.

May the odds forever be in your favor.

Innovation is an Act of Leadership

The average lifespan atop any corporate leaderboard, whether it’s the Fortune 500 or any other peer group listing, is getting shorter and shorter. Business cycles are growing increasingly brief and volatile. Yesterday’s top companies are soon long forgotten, and today’s leaders are already watching out for tomorrow’s darlings in their rearview mirror.

Success is unfortunately a poor teacher. We become so focused on perfecting all of the things that made us successful in the first place that we don’t notice when those things become less relevant in a changing environment.

How is that some companies seem to defy the gravitational pull of these forces? How do some companies always find new ways to keep the growth engine going? How do they transition their company’s focus from low growth products to high growth products?

Innovation for Growth

The short answer, in a word, is innovation.

Innovation is what enables companies to “jump the S-Curve“; to catch the wave of a high growth business before their existing waves lose too much momentum. This is what Apple has done so well for so long (until now maybe, although I am not one to count them out just yet after failing to extend their 13 years of record quarterly earnings). Steve Jobs returned to a largely irrelevant Apple in 1997, with a fast eroding single digit market share in personal computers. His first act of leadership was to slash the product portfolio to focus on doing fewer things better.

This theme resonates with leaders of financial institutions. “Focus on our core business” they say, “we don’t want to be out on the bleeding edge, but we’ll be fast followers” (or not…). The problem with this strategy over the long run is that eventually the core business slows down as a category, and then the only way to drive continual growth is to take more market share, which calls for massive scale to offset thinning profit margins. By definition, there are very few winners in a shrinking market.

Jobs’ hunker down strategy was clearly the right one for the time of his return to Apple, but it was not how he built it into the world’s most valuable company. His lasting legacy is how he created new products at the right times to capture market share in the growing categories of digital music, smartphones and tablets. It remains to be seen if Tim Cook can do it again in smartwatches, in-home entertainment, or even the Apple Car, but innovation is a valued and expected act of leadership in the company’s culture.

One of a Leader’s Most Important Roles

Of course leaders must ensure that ongoing operations are efficient, compliant and profitable this very quarter, but this ‘Tyranny of the Urgent‘ too often creates a tunnel vision that ignores external threats and opportunities.

One of a leader’s most important roles is the effective allocation of resources– financial resources, human resources, managerial attention– and the best leaders allocate resources not to optimize for current returns, but over the long run. (Sometimes easier said than done for publicly traded companies, but Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has done this exceedingly well.)

The Japanese principle of Kaizen is most often associated with lean manufacturing and continuous improvement, and perhaps most famously at Toyota. Kaizen (“change for better”) expects everyone at every level to contribute to continuous improvement, in addition to meeting the standards as currently defined. That expectation rises for more senior leaders and begins to include not just continuous improvement, but also the expectation for innovation and the implementation of completely new ideas.

The leader’s role in driving and supporting innovation is clear in Kaizen. Simply hitting this quarter’s numbers is not enough.

Whether new ideas are created from the front lines, in an internal lab or by external entrepreneurs, they only become valuable when they are implemented. That takes a leader willing to dedicate the right resources– and that usually means directing them from something else– in order create a new source of value for the company.

Innovation doesn’t just happen. It’s an act of leadership.

The World I Want to Live In

Demographically, I am about as “mainstream majority” as they come. I am a Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant male who worked most of his career in the banking industry. An upper-middle class suburbanite heterosexual American to boot. No one would use the word “activist” to describe me. I’m apolitical to a fault, and I don’t talk about much of anything publicly that isn’t directly related to innovation, strategy and leadership in fintech and financial services.

So why should I care at all about this so-called FemTech Leaders movement that seeks to improve gender diversity in fintech and beyond? Why would I even show up at an event focused on empowering women in fintech, let alone promote it on social media?

Three very simple reasons.

First, it’s good business.

Financial services is an especially cacophonous echo chamber, and I want to be surrounded by as many widely diverse perspectives as possible. Different mindsets, different experiences, different approaches. Views I would have never come up with on my own.

It’s just a dumb business practice to exclude half of our population from the conversation. Especially during a time when so many threats and opportunities are impacting the entire industry in such huge ways.

Second, it’s more like the world where I grew up and live.

I had a strong grandmother and mother whose importance to my childhood would be impossible to overstate. My mom tells the story of my grandmother bringing home a pair of bright red shoes when she was younger. My grandfather told her they were too flashy and not very “ladylike”, and ordered her back to the store. So back to the store she went— only to return with a matching belt, purse and gloves in the same ostentatious crimson hue. Grandma didn’t need anyone’s permission to wear (or do) whatever she wanted. I always loved that about her.

My mom is naturally curious. She doesn’t have a lot of so-called formal education, but she has what we call “the figure it out gene”, and I wrote before that she has a PhD in common sense (2019 Update: my mom lost her decades-long battle with COPD this year). It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate formal education. She grew up in a different era in a blue collar family that worked early and often, but she made sure that I was the first person in the family to go to college. “When you go to college…” I always remember saying to me when I was young. Never “If you go”. She instilled in me my love of reading, learning, and traveling, and she encouraged me to explore, take risks and be an early adopter. I wouldn’t be who I am today without her.

My wife is a lot like my grandmother. She didn’t listen to anyone’s career advice about who paid the most or who had the best perks, she devoted her career to helping women who were victims of violent crimes. She has been paged to the emergency room in the middle of the night more times than I can count, got injured in a courtroom brawl, threatened with being thrown in the back of the paddy wagon by a police officer who didn’t appreciate her staunch advocacy for a victim’s rights at the scene of a crime, and helped survivors and their families deal with evidence and testimony that is truly unspeakable and heartbreaking. She could have made more money working at the local mall, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way.

I want more awesome women in my life, not fewer.

Finally, it’s more like the world where I want my daughter to work in and live.

There is another awesome woman in my life. She went from wearing diapers to school uniforms to college sweatshirts to an employee ID badge in what I swear could have only been a few short years. She went to an all-girls school where the motto was “Giving Girls Their Voice”. We, and she, saw first hand the power of every leadership position of every class and every club being held by a girl, and the power of every Ravens’ sporting contest being THE big game— not just the second-rate ‘Lady Ravens’ alternative to the boys’ teams.

These leadership lessons stick with the girls through college and beyond, where the harsh reality of the other 50% of the population invade these artificial constructs. By then they are unafraid to raise their hand in a crowded lecture hall to answer a professor’s tough question, or even better— to disagree with a point in the book. They don’t think twice about whether it’s OK to run for class officer, or play sports, or start a new club on campus. They major in whatever the hell they want.

My daughter found her own voice and I don’t ever want her to lose it.

More Work To Be Done

That’s why the FemTech Leaders movement is so important. It’s not about creating an exclusive group just for women to feel better about being in the minority, it’s about connecting the power of the minds and spirits in all of us to make this industry and this world just a little bit better than the way we found it.

Let’s not stop here though. We have massive under-representation of ethnic, racial, religious, orientation, and other minorities in fintech and financial services. The same benefits of diversity are only multiplied when we make a broader effort of inclusion.

So, my reasons may not be particularly high-minded or socially conscious. I’ll leave it to someone else to inform and inspire you with statistics on workforce participation and pay gaps, and the economic inequalities of non-inclusion.

I just know the world that I want to live in.