Most Influential Women in Fintech

May 8, 2023 3:57 PM

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

Influence in the fintech sector takes many forms. There are the entrepreneurs who work long hours to build businesses, create jobs and develop innovative products that help people. There are the venture capitalists who take a chance on these founders with fresh ideas and give them the funding to keep going. There are industry organizers who get everyone on the same page on important matters such as industry self-regulation. And there are consultants and lawyers who help the industry get past all the obstacles that arise.

American Banker's inaugural Most Influential Women in Fintech honors women in all these categories. Why just women? Because the numbers are still dismal for women in fintech. Female-founded startups raised 1.9% of all venture capital funds in 2022, a drop from 2021, according to Pitchbook. Industry observers estimate that female-led startups in the fintech sector received about half of that. By recognizing the outstanding female leaders, we aim to highlight the contributions they are making alongside their male colleagues and allies.

All the people on the list below are helping to bring new financial technology to life and move the industry forward in its efforts to help consumers, businesses and financial institutions innovate and bring about better financial products and experiences.

Amanda Abrams

CEO
Cohen Circle

Amanda Abrams is bracing for a significant 2024.

As CEO of investment firm Cohen Circle, Abrams helped create the firm's newest venture fund, Radiate Capital. The fund, which will launch in 2024, will be led by Cohen Circle Founder Betsy Cohen and Henrietta Fore, a former executive director of UNICEF, and will focus on investing in financial services firms and health care companies that are improving access to these services in underserved areas. The hope is to accelerate the growth of fintech companies and the populations they reach around the world.

Besides working on the Radiate Capital fund, Abrams spends much of her time connecting with current and potential investors, investment bankers, board members and current and potential portfolio companies. Overall, Cohen Circle focuses on investments in the fintech and technology sectors and has raised more than $5 billion since it was founded in 2015.

Cohen Circle's operations reach across the U.S. and Europe. Abrams has a few tips on how to integrate in-person and hybrid schedules and bridge this wide geographic divide. Making face time with staff members meaningful is essential, she said. Abrams visits the Cohen Circle's New York office a few times each month, and during those visits she has a team lunch to better understand challenges staff members are facing and to offer better support.

Abrams also advises completing any task that will take five minutes or less immediately. That frees up mental energy for other priorities and gives an intrinsic sense of accomplishment. Though work-life balance always seems to be a work in process, taking an annual trip that is long enough to actually unwind and unplug and connect with friends or family is crucial, she said.

And finally, to-do lists and prioritizing tasks are critical ways to stay on top of everything.

"Breaking out tasks by what I need to accomplish immediately (that day) and in the medium and long term helps me focus my time appropriately and breaks what could be an overwhelming number of tasks into manageable lists," she said. — Jackie Stewart

Michele Alt

Partner and co-founder
Klaros Group

Michele Alt, a 32-year fintech veteran, cocreated Klaros Group in November 2019 to help clients find practical ways to build scale and momentum while navigating the complex regulatory landscape.

Alt, who worked in the law department of the office of the comptroller of the currency for 22 years, leads Klaros' bank licensing consultancy practice, and advises fintechs on the particularly thorny issue of how to provide banking services to customers without having a banking license. And given recent heightened scrutiny by regulators about the relationships between banks and fintechs, Alt's experience and insight will likely be in even more demand.

While Alt described being a co-founder as "the most challenging project I've ever taken on," she added that the experience has helped her grow as a professional and as a leader. She's learned how to get out of her comfort zone and take on a larger role in business development. She also now ensures she takes time to connect with staff, takes breaks when needed and encourages others to do so as well, and remains calm when reacting to changes.

"As I often remind my team, we are not heart-lung transplant specialists. Our work is important, but not life or death," she said.

Mentoring and elevating other women in the industry is important to Alt, who gave gender equality in fintech a grade of C+. "Although I've seen some progress, many fintech teams are still male dominated," she said.

Conversely, Alt said that the banks her clients interact with have diverse teams and women in key decision-making roles.

"I have counseled some of my clients that lack of diversity isn't just bad culture, it's bad regulatory strategy," she said. — Mary Ellen Egan

Jo Ann Barefoot

CEO and co-founder
Alliance for Innovative Regulation

Jo Ann Barefoot wants financial regulation to keep pace with the evolution of technology, which means using technology to innovate regulation and updating regulation around technology. As co-founder and CEO of the Alliance for Innovative Regulation, she's focused on using technology to enhance the financial system. By adopting more innovation into regulatory processes, the financial system could be more equal, profitable and safe, Barefoot wrote to American Banker.

"By digitizing the data involved, we can level the playing field on regulatory burden between large banks and small ones, and between banks and nonbanks," Barefoot said. "We can make financial services much more widely affordable, and yet profitable. We can massively improve the accuracy of credit underwriting. We can catch terrorists, and criminals who launder money to profit from crimes like human trafficking. We could very likely have averted the financial crisis, and therefore the Great Recession, by detecting the buildup of risk contagion in subprime lending. We can make the whole system work better, cheaper and faster, all at once."

Barefoot has spent more than 45 years working in financial regulation, including as deputy comptroller of the currency, a U.S. Senate staffer, senior fellow emerita at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a consultant for financial institutions. She also wrote "A Regtech Manifesto" in 2020, which argues for the gradual overhaul of the financial regulatory system into a digitally native, data-heavy framework.

Last year, Barefoot wrote in a column in American Banker that regulators had been enhancing their mindset around innovation, including by hiring more technology specialists, honing in on digital assets, AI-driven models for credit underwriting and faster payments capabilities.

"Rome wasn't built in a day, nor should federal agencies tasked with protecting consumers and the financial markets rush their digital makeover," Barefoot said in the column. "But these innovations will only continue and advance — the time is now for regulators to begin their digital awakening." — Catherine Leffert

Sarah Biller

Co-founder
Fintech Sandbox

Sarah Biller, the co-founder of Fintech Sandbox, a Boston-based not-for-profit providing entrepreneurs with access to high-quality datasets, is a self-proclaimed part-entrepreneur, part-investor and part-educator.

"And [I'm] completely dedicated to expanding financial access to more people, sustainable and inclusive finance and building the fintechs of the future," she said.

Biller, who is also the executive director of Vantage Ventures, an effort to build and invest in scalable, capital efficient companies in Appalachia, said her work has helped central banks and regulatory bodies across the globe, including those in Singapore and the United Kingdom.

Due to her success abroad, she recently turned her focus back to the U.S., specifically on building a financial services system that works for anyone, anywhere and at any time.

"Due to our size, unique culture of small businesses driving our economy, federated regulatory structure and macroeconomic transition, this focus on reshaping the future requires that we expand the footprint of fintech solutions to both inclusivity to sustainability, and to build from the bottom-up," she said.

That work eventually led her back home to Appalachia, where she took her experience in fintech and capital raising and her commitment to investing in the region to serve as an active director of Thread Bank, a community bank in rural Tennessee.

"I worked hand-in-hand with the team and regulators to build a new example of a Main Street bank, with a digital infrastructure that can serve its community wherever it is," she said. "I combined this work with my on-the-ground effort in West Virginia to link entrepreneurs building high-growth companies to support and capital, such as with our groundbreaking work with Huntington Bank to launch a fund for these rising businesses."

Biller said building the next generation of financial services requires leaders to connect what they are doing with a higher purpose. And for women who are leading fintech efforts, there will be days when "it is difficult to get up and keep moving the ball forward, but connection to a higher purpose envelops us in the empathy, resilience and strength we need to succeed in spite of the challenges we face." — Ken McCarthy

Nadine Chakar

CEO
Securrency

Nadine Chakar draws upon more than 30 years of experience to tackle one of the most challenging and interesting areas of fintech today — blockchain.

Chakar is the CEO of Securrency, which focuses on compliance-aware tokenization, decentralized finance and account management using blockchain technology. She is responsible for the company's worldwide operations and oversees the commercialization of Securrency's platform.

Besides leading Securrency, Chakar's impressive resume includes previously overseeing State Street Digital, which was founded in 2021 to drive traditional banking activities into the digital economy. In that role, she worked with clients and the industry on decentralized finance.

Chakar's job is made harder by the fact that many in financial services are still confused about how blockchain works and differs from crypto.

"Some time ago, I was in a meeting trying to make a pitch, and a gentleman said, 'I love what you're doing, but we can't deal with bitcoin,'" Chakar said. "Well, I turned around and pointed out that it's not bitcoin; it's blockchain. To which he replied: 'It's all the same!'"

The challenge for Securrency and others in the blockchain sector is to bring skeptics on board through education and innovative products, Chakar said. She called it a "win for all of us" any time someone issues a product on blockchain, and she estimated that this space would be worth $16 trillion by 2030.

"From all of the research you look at, we are going to see the world tokenized," Chakar said. "We are going to see banks, insurance companies and individual investors growing in numbers as people continue to see how easy this technology makes everything. Successful leaders will be the ones who recognize this and who will be able to bring the various stakeholders in this industry together and guide them towards a common vision: to drive this remarkable technology forward, to ensure the ecosystem is capable of handling this remarkable innovation, and ultimately to continue the work of building the foundations of tomorrow's capital markets." — Jackie Stewart

Jenny Cheng

General manager of Google Wallet
Google

Jenny Cheng was integral to the success of Google Wallet's relaunch last year — and it's only the latest in a long line of projects that have thrived under her leadership.

Cheng, general manager of Google Wallet, led the product and engineering teams behind the mobile payment service when she joined the company in April of last year. Since then, she has overseen the debut of Wallet in 63 countries and territories as well as the development of new features such as digital car keys and mobile driver licenses.

"We are creating a world in which the tools you need to navigate your daily life are easily accessible, but highly secure, through your mobile device. … While this undertaking has certainly kept me busy, leading a project that benefits billions of people around the world inspires me every day," Cheng said.

Before joining Google, she was a vice president on PayPal's product and engineering leadership team for the merchant and partner division. In that role, she assisted clients ranging from large companies to small businesses with setting up integrations for online payments. Cheng said that experience showed her the importance of building simpler and more effective tools that end users desperately need.

"It's often easy for teams to get caught up in pie-in-the-sky ideas, but sometimes, the most groundbreaking feature for the end user is something as simple as a 'copy-and-paste' function," Cheng said.

The importance of diversity, equity and inclusion has similarly remained a core focus throughout her more than 20-year tenure in the technology space, and has guided Cheng in her leadership as an Asian-American woman at the executive level.

In addition to her roles with Google's Asian and female employee resource groups, Cheng draws on her expertise and perspective to mentor junior staff members interested in moving up the ranks and challenges them to set goals based on what they really want.

"I don't think it's enough to say that diverse leadership is important, because gender parity should be a goal for all organizations," Cheng said. "We need to be precise and intentional about the ways that diverse leadership can enhance team dynamics and prioritize creative thoughtful outputs to push the needle for the broader fintech industry." — Frank Gargano

Anna Counselman

Co-founder and head of business operations
Upstart

A decade ago, Anna Counselman left a promising career at the tech behemoth Google to take a plunge into the unknown. She helped found a startup.

Today, Counselman leads business operations at Upstart, an AI lending marketplace that aims to expand access to affordable credit. This role includes overseeing operational scalability and employee experience — essentially how the "big picture strategy is implemented," the company said.

Counselman was inspired to help found Upstart after seeing firsthand as an immigrant — she came to the U.S. from the Soviet Union as a 12 year old — then as a homebuyer and entrepreneur how credit can unlock opportunities.

Upstart touts its credit scoring model, which uses unconventional variables, as helping to reduce the cost of borrowing and increase approval rates for those who historically have struggled with getting access to affordable loans. The company says its model has led to 43% more Black borrowers and about 45% more Hispanic borrowers being approved for credit compared with traditional credit scoring.

Since its founding in 2012, Upstart has grown from a tiny startup with one product to a company with more than 1,500 employees with multiple offerings. This has meant that Counselman has needed to grow and expand her skill set too. She has had to pivot from being a co-founder to being head of people and operations with responsibility for all talent decisions to taking on all business operations.

She has also implemented changes within the organization to ensure it could grow and succeed. This has included breaking the company into 10 different vertical teams with some being problem-oriented and others product-oriented.

Through all of this, Counselman believes in the power of AI helping to democratize credit. She noted that economic conditions will be the biggest challenge this year, forcing lenders to pull back and take a more conservative stance. She believes that AI, such as the technology that Upstart utilizes, can help these banks and credit unions make better and more accurate lending decisions. — Jackie Stewart

Maria Gotsch

President and CEO of Partnership Fund for New York City
Co-founder of the FinTech Innovation Lab

The FinTech Innovation Lab in New York City helped put the city on the map as a hub of offintech activity. Maria Gotsch, the president and CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City, is one of its founders.

The FinTech Innovation Lab is an accelerator that connects early- and growth-stage fintechs with executives at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, BlackRock and other big-name financial institutions for mentorship, product feedback and more. The program also includes workshops, panel discussions and a demo day. The banks choose the accelerator participants, "so every year it's an interesting microcosm of what is rising to the top in terms of where innovation is needed for large financial institutions," said Gotsch.

The Lab's mission was to increase the size and visibility of the fintech sector in New York.

"I think we were the first in the world to create that kind of bridge between emerging technology companies and large, difficult-to-navigate companies," said Gotsch. "Now there are a lot of people doing that, but I think we were the first to think of that as a service valuable to both sides." More than 80% of the alums are still in business and about two dozen have been acquired.

The influence of the FinTech Innovation Lab has blossomed beyond fintech and beyond New York City. There are now sister programs in London and Asia-Pacific. In 2018, Gotsch helped create the Transit Tech Lab, an accelerator centering on innovation in New York's public transit systems, drawing from her experience with the original Lab.

Gotsch has found, to her surprise, that the FinTech Innovation Lab has earned a reputation among international startups as a key to entering the U.S. market. At least half of each accelerator class comes from outside of New York City every year, and about 30% of non-New York companies establish an office or move their headquarters to the city. — Miriam Cross

Gabriella Kusz

Co-founder and CEO
Global Digital Asset & Cryptocurrency Association

Having a vision is one thing, but making that vision a reality is quite another. And few people know how true that is better than Gabriella Kusz.

Kusz, who co-founded and serves as CEO for the Global Digital Asset & Cryptocurrency Association, began working with her partners to establish a self-regulatory organization for the crypto industry in late 2019 and helped create the group in June 2020. Last April, she began her tenure as CEO, and since its inception the group has proven that there is a need for the kind of mutual regulatory apparatus that the organization offers.

"I have had to step into an extremely fast paced, very dynamic and highly volatile industry, orient and organize the players, and support constructive growth and engagement," Kusz said. "Within only a few years, we have gone from zero to 80 member firms."

Based in the Chicago area, Kusz began with a loose network of more than 100 global volunteer partners, gradually turning that network into the High Level Working Group on Cryptocurrency and Digital Assets. From there, she worked to build momentum — both with crypto firms themselves and secondary firms, like banks, insurance companies, law firms and fintechs — to establish a group that could hold market participants accountable and raise the bar for best practices in the industry.

"It simultaneously required me to go beyond my comfort zone," Kusz said, adding that the effort required her to "learn how to communicate and engage with media, extend my expertise to advance U.S. legislative understanding and work to build knowledge and understanding within U.S. legislators and regulators on the subjects of blockchain, digital assets, and the need for 'balanced regulation' which could benefit both traditional financial institutions as well as emerging digitally native institutions." — John Heltman

Theodora Lau

Founder
Unconventional Ventures

Theodora Lau is a strategic advisor, author, podcaster — and all-around champion of diversity, equity and inclusion.

As the founder of consultancy Unconventional Ventures in Fairfax, Virginia, Lau connects entrepreneurs to funders and provides mentorship to startups and strategic advisory services to corporations. She also frequently writes about the need for diversity across gender, ethnicity, age, education and background, with the goal to help more financial institutions build sustainable and inclusive business models.

Her podcast, "One Vision," serves as a showcase for these efforts, including a season that exclusively focuses on women in financial services. Her most recent book, "Beyond Good," explores how financial technology is taking the lead in building a purpose-driven business revolution. Co-authored with Bradley Leimer, it features a wide spectrum of socially conscious strategies for business leaders.

Lau described the book as "a call to arms for business leaders to recognize how they can do well by doing good."

She also is a frequent public speaker, addressing topics across financial technology, artificial intelligence and equality. A key emphasis in her recent work is advocacy for women leadership and influence in the fintech arena.

"Fintech is still a male-dominated industry. Just a quick look at the list of top fintech influencers or speakers at almost any fintech conference will show the familiar faces, mostly white male," she said.

Earlier in her career, Lau worked for AARP, the nation's largest nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering Americans 50 and over as they work toward sustainable retirements. She helped the organization establish a fintech ecosystem within its broader culture. This enabled AARP to collaborate with fintech leaders, startup entrepreneurs, bank executives, venture capitalists and thought leaders to generate awareness about the needs of people 50-plus.

Her work created the framework for AARP's "Financial Services Frontier" report. — Jim Dobbs

Toko's Review

Kristy Kim

CEO
TomoCredit

Kristy Kim knows something about being underestimated.

Kim, founder and CEO of TomoCredit, started the company in 2018 after a previous career in investment banking — trading one male-dominated field for another. She said her peers have sometimes expected her to be "timid" and doubted her ability to drive innovation or exceed expectations.

Kim noted that the fintech industry has evolved in recent years with more women becoming leaders within their companies. This change has been positive and refreshing and allows more women to be heard, according to Kim.

That feeling of being misunderstood was a big part of her mission in founding TomoCredit, a company that helps customers build their credit in a couple of different ways. Customers get a credit card and the payment history is recorded by the three major credit bureaus. But the company uses alternative metrics to determine eligibility for the card — expanding the universe of people with little or no credit who can become customers.

"At TomoCredit, we want to empower our customers in a longer term period, not instantly," Kim told American Banker last year. "I want my customers, Tomo members, to thrive five, 10 years down the road financially. I want them to reach financial freedom and the best way to get there is to train users to build healthy financial habits and responsible purchasing habits. It's like anti-buy now, pay later."

That care for her customers applies to her employees as well. Kim views TomoCredit's employees as the firm's most important asset and tries to ensure that everyone knows they are all working together. Kim's leadership style is described as inspiring, positive and empowering.

At a time when many technology firms are laying off personnel, Tomo has kept its team together and even raised Series B funding last July. — John Heltman

Penny Lee

President and CEO
Financial Technology Association

Experts with the Financial Technology Association knew shortly after the group's launch in 2021 that they needed a leader well-versed in championing campaigns for inclusion and the adaptation of cutting-edge tools across the industry.

They found their answer in Penny Lee.

Using her past experiences in politics as senior advisor to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — as well as leadership positions with the Democratic Governors Association and former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell — Lee advocates for modernizing regulation around key issues, such as buy now, pay later; earned wage access and data privacy in meetings with policymakers in the White House and on Capitol Hill.

"The industry's presence in Washington must evolve … [and] we must continue to educate lawmakers and regulators, communicate the mission, products and services of the fintech industry and advocate for modernized policies that reflect market innovation," Lee said.

Lee has been instrumental in building the operational framework of the Financial Technology Association. That includes everything from establishing legal and governance processes to developing hiring manuals and employee benefits.

"Building and scaling a new organization from scratch has been challenging but also rewarding," Lee said. "I learned that it is important to be firm and purposeful in your priorities and be willing to turn down revenue if missions don't align."

Alongside her work in politics, diversity, equity and inclusion have been core values for Lee throughout her career and during her tenure with the Financial Technology Association.

As a co-founder and chair of K Street Capital, a Washington D.C.-based angel investment firm, Lee emphasized backing startup firms that were spearheaded by women and those from underrepresented demographics. About a third of the company's investments went to fund these projects.

She also holds leadership positions with nonprofit organizations in the Washington, D.C., area such as Black Girl Ventures, which works to create access to capital for Black and Brown female entrepreneurs; Center for American Entrepreneurship, which focuses on spurring more new businesses and National Links Trust, which works to increase the accessibility of golf by making municipal courses more affordable.

Even in the face of fintech being a male-dominated industry, Lee is confident that she is "starting to see a shift, and if our membership is any indication, we are seeing positive signs in the industry," she said. — Frank Gargano

Elizabeth Pagel

Consumer lending business leader
TransUnion

Few would argue that fintech is not a male-dominated industry, particularly when it comes to positions of leadership. But that has not stopped Elizabeth Pagel from advancing in her career or trying to tip the gender balance.

"When I convene panels of fintech chief risk officers, I am lucky if I can find one or two women to include," said Pagel, consumer lending business leader for TransUnion. "The balance is slowly improving, as evidenced by strong participation in women's lunches at industry conferences. Fintech culture has improved dramatically over the past several years, and the people that I interact with are welcoming, smart, dynamic and respectful of my expertise."

A long-term change can be helped by active recruiting outside of financial services, Pagel said.

"There's no reason that a rock-star leader from retail … or another industry with more women couldn't ramp up quickly and lead in fintech," she added.

At TransUnion, Pagel's team sets the strategy for the fintech business and is responsible for market development, which includes thought leadership, fintech customer relationships and industry events. Part of her responsibility is channeling TransUnion resources to build new products to address evolving market needs, and she partners with industry groups and regulators on topics important to fintechs.

So what has she found particularly challenging in her role?

Pagel said in 2019 she noticed that the rapidly growing pay-in-4 product — when a customer pays for an item over four installments — could not be incorporated into a traditional credit report under existing lending product definitions. If reported as an unsecured installment loan, consumers who used these products frequently, as lenders hoped they would, could be severely penalized under existing credit scoring.

"So I put together a group of TransUnion reporting experts and leading [buy now, pay later] lenders, and over the course of several months we developed an approach that would eliminate the risk of undue negative score impact and ultimately have the potential to help consumers build credit," she said.

Pagel's team designed the solution, got internal funding and built the capability.

In terms of challenges to the industry today, Pagel said that in an uncertain economy, fintech lenders will be challenged to time the market and take calculated risks. Going into a downturn, fintech lenders are typically the first to pull back on marketing and loan growth, she said, but they are also usually the first to come back to market when the market fundamentals improve.

"As they wait out improvement in the market, fintechs will need to focus on cross-sell with their existing good customers to drive growth. At the same time, they will face new competition from regional banks and other traditional balance sheet lenders with lower cost of capital who see a sudden opportunity to gain share," Pagel added. — Ken McCarthy

Katie Palencsar

Managing director and global head of Venture Studio
Anthemis

At fintech-focused venture capital firm Anthemis, Katie Palencsar leads the Female Innovators Lab Fund, a venture fund and studio dedicated to investing and cultivating entrepreneurial talent in women across the financial services ecosystem.

Under Katie's leadership, the $50 million fund has become one of the largest funds solely dedicated to female founders in fintech. The majority of the portfolio is made up of female founders and co-founders who are Black, Indigenous or people of color.

Prior to her work at Anthemis, Palencsar founded software-as-a-service company Unbound Concepts and brought it to acquisition in 2017. Global distributors and publishers used the software, and the company provided free software tools to more than 40,000 educators.

Palencsar has established her own advisory business with a focus on advocacy for entrepreneurs, which included working with retired NFL athletes on their new business build-outs, partnerships and monetization of their content portfolios. She has also advised Maryland's state legislature on a bill investing in female and minority-owned businesses that passed in 2019.

According to Palencsar, recent economic headwinds have caused venture capitalists to turn their focus to strengthening their current portfolios, which tend to be composed of male founders. This reduces the level of financial support available to female founders, making the fund's work more important.

"During difficult economic periods, businesses sometimes want to stay in lanes that feel comfortable, but innovation is needed now more than ever," Palencsar said. "There is an opportunity for female founders to create fintech, embedded finance, and insurance tech products and services to meet the needs of these economic tailwinds, and I'm personally excited to see what's to come." — Carter Pape

Judie Rinearson

Partner and practice group coordinator for payments, banking regulation and consumer financial services
K&L Gates

Judie Rinearson is a veteran financial services attorney who wears many hats at the global law firm K&L Gates.

She is a senior partner leading the payments, banking regulation and consumer financial services practice; co-chair of the financial technology industry team and co-chair of the digital assets, blockchain technology and cryptocurrency group.

Rinearson and her team assist fintech clients and their partner banks in navigating the web of U.S. and international laws that impact their products and services. Because she represents clients offering innovative products that do not fit easily into existing regulatory frameworks, Rinearson is known for her advocacy on behalf of clients as they work with regulators and government agencies.

Earlier in her career, Rinearson worked for American Express as counsel for Australia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. She was based in Sydney during that period. Rinearson then was named counsel for the global American Express Travelers Cheques and Prepaid Services Group, where she led the issuance of the first American Express gift card and open-loop prepaid incentive card.

She later moved into private practice at Bryan Cave, and prior to her current firm, also served as chief regulatory counsel for the U.S. Network Branded Prepaid Card Association.

Rinearson said her experience as an in-house lawyer at American Express and representing fintechs at outside law firms instilled in her the importance of educating and working with regulators and legislators as they develop the rules that govern emerging fintech products and services. She has served on many trade association boards and has worked to ensure that proposed regulations adequately address the risks perceived by government agencies without overly stifling consumer choice, creativity and innovation.

Asked what she believes are the biggest challenges facing fintechs in 2023, Rinearson cited cybercrime and fraud.

"These two villains are anathema to a payments/financial services industry relying increasingly on online and remote relationships and transactions," she said. "And with global uncertainties, … the sheer volume of cybercrime and fraud seems to be growing faster and faster every day. Keeping up with the criminals and their technology is incredibly difficult and requires significant resources." — Jim Dobbs

Janelle Sallenave

Chief experience officer
Chime Financial

Customers have flocked to Chime Financial because of its promise of user friendly benefits, such as no monthly fees. It's Janelle Sallenave's job to keep them happy.

As chief experience officer at the neobank, Sallenave oversees more than 4,000 employees in the areas of operations, support and member experience. Her accomplishments have included launching a live chat feature, which reduced overall costs by 20% and improved the company's customer care net promoter score.

Under Sallenave's leadership, Chime now also allows customers to dispute a potentially fraudulent transaction while it is still pending. Normally, the transaction has to be settled before a customer can dispute it. Chime said that this had led to more than 75% of disputes being resolved within two days and customer satisfaction scores more than doubling.

"Chime's program enables members to get money returned to them faster and goes hand-in-hand with our mission to make sure members' needs are being met," Sallenave said. "We were able to use a data-driven approach to build a program that solves a problem for the everyday consumer."

Besides focusing on improving the customer experience at Chime, Sallenave has strived to improve the work environment for her employees, specifically with an eye toward diversity and inclusion. She has created a competencies framework for all reviews under her purview so that there is consistency around expectations, and she was the first to complete individual goal planning to emphasize more objectivity in performance evaluations and promotions. Forty percent of the leaders under Sallenave are female and 59% of employees hired into her organization last year were from non-tech backgrounds.

"Although things have improved in recent years, fintech is an extremely male-dominated industry, with women underrepresented at every level," Sallenave said.

"[T]he common practice of recruiting through professional networks can make it more difficult for women without any type of connection to get their foot in the door," she added. — Jackie Stewart

Laura Spiekerman

Co-founder and president
Alloy

September 2022 was a red-letter month for Laura Spiekerman and Alloy, the identity decisioning platform she helped found in 2015.

Alloy began the month by raising $52 million in a funding round that pushed its valuation to $1.55 billion. It was definitely a feather in the cap for Spiekerman, who was serving as the company's chief revenue officer at the time. Later that month, Spiekerman presided over Alloy's first client conference in Santa Monica, California. She spoke at the three-day event and helped coordinate 10 small-group dinners. The conference succeeded in converting several prospects into new Alloy customers, Spiekerman said.

In October, Spiekerman reaped the rewards for seven years of hard work, much of it behind-the-scenes, when she was named Alloy's president. Central to her new role is building and nurturing client relationships — something Spiekerman has had a hand in since Alloy's lean startup days, when she scoured the internet and networked furiously to convince companies to test its product.

Indeed, Spiekerman said one of her biggest career highlights was signing Detroit-based Ally Financial as a client. Landing a bank the size of $196.2 billion-asset Ally proved to be a milestone "because it showed other large banks in the market that they could rely on Alloy to be a professional and effective fraud prevention solution," Spiekerman said.

Spiekerman has a unique background as a fintech entrepreneur, facilitating the creation of two successful companies. In 2010, she was an inaugural hire at Kenyan payments startup Kopo Kopo, where she served as director of marketing. After an eventful 10 months that included work on a successful capital raise, Spiekerman moved back to the U.S. and eventually joined Knox Payments, a Richmond, Virginia-based startup as head of business development and strategic partnerships. It was at Knox Payments that Spiekerman met Tommy Nicholas and Charles Hearn, with whom she co-founded Alloy.

Another of Spiekerman's responsibilities as president is managing Alloy's relationship with regulators, a job growing in importance for all fintechs, she said. According to Spiekerman, nearly half of fintech executives cite regulatory risk as their companies' biggest threat.

"With regulatory scrutiny increasing around bank-fintech partnerships, crypto, peer-to-peer payments platforms and more, being compliant will be key to fintech's success in 2023," Spiekerman said. — John Reosti

Dara Chevlin Tarkowski

Managing partner and co-founder
Actuate Law

Dara Chevlin Tarkowski is one of five founding partners of Actuate Law, which offers a range of legal services from commercial litigation to white-collar investigations and litigation. Actuate also caters to fintechs, and performs due diligence, provides regulatory compliance counseling and handles law enforcement investigations and actions.

Tarkowski started her legal career as a litigation associate at Katten Muchin Rosenman, and then joined Akerman as an equity partner. At Actuate, she frequently handles consumer class actions, commercial disputes and advocates for clients regarding finance laws before state attorneys general, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators.

She is also the chief innovation strategist for Quointec, a subsidiary of Actuate Law, which offers automated regulation technology solutions for subscribers. Tarkowski recently designed a new release of the Accounts Receivable Management Communications Advisor, which is essentially a robot lawyer for financial institutions who need to communicate with consumers about a debt obligation.

Outside of Actuate, Tarkowski serves as outside general counsel to Fintex, a nonprofit trade association focused on innovation in financial services, and is an ambassador for Findexable's Fintech Diversity Radar, which tracks data on women in fintech to promote more diversity and inclusion.

With more than 15 years of experience across law, finance and technology, Tarkowski said the fintech industry still struggles to achieve true equality. "Today, I would give the fintech industry a C [grade] for gender equity. That's below average. And it's worse at leadership/C-suite levels. It is simply still very male dominated," she said.

"A commitment to diversity needs to begin with business leadership. Boards — whether they're overseeing our schools, government agencies, startups or big corporations, should reflect our communities. At the same time, we all know the path to gender equality requires strong male allies." — Mary Ellen Egan

Leslie Goldman Tepper

General partner and co-founder
Artemis Fund

Leslie Goldman Tepper is not just inspiring the current generation of female tech entrepreneurs — she is creating a pathway for them.

Tepper is one of three co-founders of Artemis Fund, a venture capital firm that invests in scalable, female-founded technology companies that are focused on democratizing access to wealth. As general partner, she meets with startups looking for funding, oversees participation in funding rounds and serves as an advisor or board member for the firm's portfolio companies. Tepper also works closely with the firm's associate program, which provides internships to female college and graduate students who want to work in the VC world.

Since its creation in 2019, Artemis Fund has completed two rounds of funding and has invested in nine fintechs and payments companies, including Fundid, a small-business finance platform, and UNest, an app people can use to manage investment accounts for children.

Tepper said that starting Artemis Fund with partners Diana Murakhovskaya and Stephanie Campbell has been her most challenging project. She said that this has taught her the importance of teamwork and relying on the strengths of her colleagues.

"Knowing your strengths and when you have to lead [versus] follow are key to success," she added. "For example, my partners are both more methodical and data-driven, while I am more strategic and visionary. Sometimes that means I need to step back and let them take the lead, and that is easy to do because I trust my team."

Of the top 1,000 fintechs, only 68 are led by a female CEO and, on average, about 11% of directors are women, according to data from Findexible. Tepper added that last year 1.9% of all venture capital money went to women, while in fintech, it was about half that. Tepper and her team are working to change that.

"There is more access to capital now for female entrepreneurs, but given the disparity of women in finance and tech roles, there is still work to be done," Tepper said.

"Fintech and finance have always historically been male-dominated," she added. "People tend to stick with what we know, and women creating financial solutions has not been a common sight. Currently, I haven't seen many changes in the past few years." — Jackie Stewart

Tanya Van Court

CEO
Goalsetter

Tanya Van Court, CEO of Goalsetter, learned the hard way how important a good financial education can be.

Van Court, who holds a master's degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University, served as an executive at Covad Communications, a fast-growing high-speed internet provider that went public in January 2000, raising more than $140 million. The shares she received from Covad's initial public offering made Van Court a millionaire, but she failed to take an elementary step that might have protected some of that hard-earned dot-com wealth.

Van Court never diversified. She held on to all her stock and stock options. For a time, that seemed like a wise decision as Covad shares, valued at $18 in the Jan. 22, 2000, IPO, rose to nearly $21 a few months later. In February 2001, however, Covad disclosed internal control weaknesses that would cause it to delay filing its annual 10-K and other financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By July 2001, Covad shares were trading at 33 cents. The company filed for bankruptcy in August, erasing what little remained of Van Court's nest egg.

The daughter of an East Oakland, California, elementary school teacher, Van Court grew up in a family that prized education, but the curriculum never extended to financial literacy.

To her credit, Van Court bounced back from her stock-market catastrophe. Over the next 13 years, Van Court would hold high-ranking executive jobs at Cablevision, ESPN, Nickelodeon and Discovery. At the same time, Van Court vowed to give her children a high-quality financial education. She knew she'd succeeded when her daughter, Gabrielle, asked for enough money to fund an investment account along with a bicycle as an eighth birthday present.

Van Court's vision expanded to educating children around the country. In 2016, Van Court launched Goalsetter, a platform that helps young people and families save and invest while teaching them the finer points of money management. While Goalsetter offers a savings account and debit card for younger users, it places a premium on financial literacy. It features hundreds of financial-literacy quizzes parents can require their children to take. Under the optional "learn before you burn" rule, Goalsetter debit cards will freeze Sunday mornings if kids haven't completed these assignments, according to Van Court.

"We felt strongly that people needed to build a foundation that would allow them to have a better relationship with their finances and that can only be done by teaching them the language of money," Van Court said. Children who save regularly are more likely to attend college and to invest in stocks as young adults, Van Court added.

The Goalsetter platform offers marketing and educational content. Behind-the-scenes bank and credit union partners provide the financial-services infrastructure. In 2021, for instance, the Montebello, New York-based Sterling Bancorp (which has since merged with Stamford, Connecticut-based Webster Financial) pledged to kickstart Goalsetter savings accounts for 1,000 students by seeding them with $40 deposits.

In 2022, U.S. Bancorp conducted a pilot program, asking more than 200 employees to enroll their families in Goalsetter. Nearly three-quarters of participants indicated they planned to continue using Goalsetter after the eight-week pilot ended.

For Van Court, her efforts to obtain investor cash to fuel Goalsetter's expansion has added another chapter to her own financial education. Goalsetter received $19 million from two oversubscribed investor rounds in 2021, but Van Court, one of the few Black CEOs and founders in the fintech space, found the process difficult.

"It was a woman-led venture capital fund that afforded me my seed round and a Black-led fund that made my Series A round possible," Van Court said. "Even with that, we were raising a fraction of what our counterparts were."

"While there is definitely more awareness around the need for diversification in the tech industry, highly qualified female entrepreneurs still face a very high rate of rejection due to the persistent bias in venture capital," Van Court added. — John Reosti