Most influential women in payments conference: Empowering the next generation of powerful women in payments

Hear research that explores the state of women in leadership in payments and identifies the drivers that are critical to developing more women in leadership positions and how women-led company cultures routinely rank high in employee satisfaction. 

Transcript:

Kate Fitzgerald (00:09):

Okay, we are going to get started on the next panel.

Kate Fitzgerald (00:18):

Thank you. That was a really great interaction we had with the audience starting out. We have two extremely dynamic speakers here. I am Kate Fitzgerald, Senior Editor at American Banker in the payments team. Covered payments for many years and it is so exciting every year when we get this group of people together, I see more men in the room, which is really exciting because moving together toward the goals of women in leadership. And this session is about the empowering the next generation of powerful women in payments. I feel like we have come a long way and now we are getting to sort of a level the next level where we are starting to see where, where is this going, where we have been and how are we going to build a ladder for other women who are coming into this field? So I am going to let each of my panelists des introduce themselves and describe a little bit about their jobs and the scope of their jobs first.

Anusha Ramanujam (01:13):

Good morning. Thanks Kate. My name is Anusha Ramanujam. I Lead Payment Partnerships and Product Enablement Iat Square. I think next year is going to be 20 years in payments. For me, I just happen into payments. I think it was a choice between going and working for a trucking company in Arkansas and a bank in Salinas, California. I picked a ladder, but I can say that since then I have intentionally picked a role and I have played a role in almost every aspect of the value chain. Work for banks, work for network, work for merchants, acquirers and globally. And at Square I lead a fantastic team that helps enable pretty much every payment, product or hardware that gets rolled out. And we manage all of the amazing partnerships with many of the folks in the room here that we work with. So thank you for making the time for today.

Whitney Stewart Russell (02:02):

Hi, I am Whitney Stewart Russell. I head up digital banking at Pfizer, so I am responsible for delivering all sorts of payment experiences through about 3,700 financial institutions in the US and abroad. I am a self-professed payment geek. I have been doing it many more years than you. I hate to just say the number, but a long time in both financial institutions, FinTech service providers like Fiserv today as well as at brands and through different card providers as well. So I love it. I love everything about it. I think it just is a fantastic career that gives you all sorts of opportunities to do different things and I am thrilled to talk about it today. My hobbies are, I am on the paycheck women board. I know, I saw some other paycheck women here, a great organization way to build your careers in the industry. And then I am also on the board of something tech Alpharetta. So I live in Alpharetta, Georgia and we incubate small payment fintechs in the local area. So I just love it. It is how I like to spend my extra time when I am not at a volleyball match for my daughter. And thrilled to talk about bringing more women into the business today.

Kate Fitzgerald (03:17):

I love how you brought, another thing we like to talk about is bringing your whole life into the business. She mentioned your daughter and what I write these profiles, I have been doing this for years, but I get so excited when I read them and each person is so unique and I get into their lives and get a glimpse of like, wow, how are they juggling all this and the energy that comes through. And one of the things about payments that really is different than banking for me, maybe banking is as exciting to the banking people, but my palms start to sweat when I am talking about payments and it is been years and I look at a payment terminal and I am like, I have never seen this. What are they doing? And it is something that you see when you are traveling. It is something you see in your daily life. It is something you can explain to your neighbor a little bit. And so can you guys talk about the past to payments and why we are talking about developing the next generation of women? Why, what are the skills that women or young women in school in the pipeline, why would they want to go into payments?

Anusha Ramanujam (04:16):

I think payments is extremely magnetic and it is super relatable. I mean, think about almost everything in your life. It is what you buy, what you are watching on Netflix, what you are paying for at a restaurant. Yeah, if you have medical payments, it is pretty much everywhere. I kid you not. I find a way to bring payments on into every conversation, date night's not excluded. And whether it is talking to my sister about, okay, which credit card to use for the best rewards or talking to my bonus kids who are teenagers. And I will tell you this anecdote, I was at dinner in January and we were talking to, so there is two teenagers home and it was dinner and we were on a vacation, we were on an island and we were talking about of course payments and it was something about a credit and debit. And the 17 year old was like, they should really teach us in school.

(05:06)

I mean, you should have seen the beaming smile on my face. I am like, of course. So education and early education about payments, I think it is very relatable and learning about financial health, security of payments, how to manage your money, the earlier you get into it, I think it is super great and it is a great field to make a courier and because it is extremely relatable and my palm sweat for a really good reason because I am like, yes, you want to talk about payments? So yeah, I think it is a great career and especially not only for women, especially for women, but for everybody and for women especially as we wear multiple hats, we are parents wear partners, we are caregivers, we are professionals, we are creatives. I think it is really great because you can wear those multiple hats. You do that in your own life and when you are in payments and if you are charting a career, I think picking different aspects of payments and playing a role that has personally helped me because then I can develop empathy for no matter which side I am in. Am I an issuing partner? Am I a merchant? Am I a small business owner? Am I a customer? I can develop that empathy. And I think having that innate skillset that we all have as wearing multiple hats and of course wearing different shoes really, really helps.

Kate Fitzgerald (06:21):

Great. And Whitney, you want to talk about the payments from the perspective of your organization, which is quite different.

Whitney Stewart Russell (06:29):

Yeah, I think the interesting thing about payments, whether it is at Fiserv or really anywhere, is that you really have to be expert in a lot of different pieces of payments to be successful. And I think it makes for a wonderful career. I think you could be in a call center running an operation for a call center focused on payments. You could be in technology, you could be in marketing, you could be in design trying to figure out that next great payment experience. So I think it is just creates tons of opportunity for diversity of career. Certainly the case at Fiserv, we cover just about every aspect of the payment ecosystem and I think the wonderful thing about big organizations like ours and others out there is that you can really reinvent your career and you can also just learn a ton. Like I said, I have been in the industry 30 plus years and I feel like there has not been a day in those 30 years that I have not been learning something new. So I think as a young person looking to find a career and figure out what fits them, payments is such a lovely place because you can try on lots of different roles. You do not have to be specific to a particular department or discipline. You can be, as you said, lots of different hats every day.

Kate Fitzgerald (07:45):

You do not hear about people getting stuck on a track that they can not get out of, not that happens in banking. So another unique thing about, well these panelists is we have Square and Pfizer, both are international and that introduces a whole new dimension to what we are talking about in terms of recruiting and diversity and inclusion. You want to talk each of you Anusha, if you want to tell a little bit about your role and what you are doing to help develop women within your company and how that's different than a company that does not have that international angle.

Anusha Ramanujam (08:15):

Absolutely. So we operate in a variety of countries and what is really important for us is serving communities both externally with our small businesses and sellers, but also internally. So we have a variety of communities, women at women, engineers at, I mean it is pretty warm here, but in San Francisco you will see me, I am often rocking out my women engineering socks and they are beautifully designed by a talented colleague of ours. I digress. But so internationally, so a big focus is internal mobility and upward mobility. Just last year we had an example of a colleague who led our partnerships business in Australia and she wanted to move for personal reasons to the uk. So found an opportunity and not only did we celebrate all of our accomplishments in Australia and center off with a huge sendoff, but also big welcome fanfare to the UK and welcome this person.

(09:07)

And when you see that true investment from, and it is at all level, it is like our CEO, our CFO, head of people, they are all dynamic women, but it is also women and all of the allies that we have. When you are constantly investing that and you are providing those opportunities, whether it is short term work from abroad, whether it is an international assignment or just picking up and moving your bags and moving to a different country when you have an opportunity that you create, then when you see that you are sharing those experiences and we are able to attract diverse and talent across the globe, I mean we are not in every country but wherever we are and we are able to provide that flexibility while you know that you are going to be taken care of because leadership and every level from there is going to invest in you as an employee.

(09:54)

So that is been really, really powerful for us at Square and I am sure and in several other companies, I got the opportunity to work from Asia on an international assignment about kind of five-ish years into my career, in my career and that was really, really exciting. And when you have the ability for countries who have solved the internal mobility and global mobility problem pretty well and you are sharing those experiences through these communities, we have a Slack channel for women at everybody at Square is part of women at it is not just women, it is many of our allies. We are part of that and we are sharing like, hey, how did you navigate this? What are the visa issues? You just have that resource and you have that investment and people just, and internal employees of course they we are, we are long tenure but we also are able to attract a lot of people. When I am interviewing people I am able to talk to these examples and it really resonates. Whitney, how do you do that? You are crossing borders with the thing that other people are doing of trying to build talent from within. How does it work?

Whitney Stewart Russell (10:54):

We do. So we are lucky that we have lots of ERG groups and one of which we call win, which is the Women impact network. And we do that globally and we have leaders in each of our geographies that come together and they share best practices and they also purposely involve executives like myself into kind of sessions that they might have webinars, discussions in person. And I think what is been interesting about that networking on top of networking globally is that we have been able to create this global network of women that know who they can reach out to for advice, guidance, mentorship, advocacy, but it also plays into opening the doors of ideas of things they did not think were possible. So we might have someone in Poland working on merchant acceptance and they never thought they could maybe go work in issuing in the United States or in Australia or what have you.

(11:50)

And I think that networking and that community that we have created even virtually across the different ERG groups has really been a benefit to Fiserv because we get diversity of thinking, diversity of background, and then even though we would like to think that payments work similarly in most countries, they are very different and I think we have actually been able to innovate in different countries leveraging what is happening in different parts of the world and it is been those seeds of networking that create great opportunities for women and others in their careers to go spend some time in a different country or work on a project. I love the comment earlier about just raise your hand. I think especially when you are up spread across the world and you want to move ahead and advance your career and payments, raise your hand because you will find wonderful opportunities to do some really cool things and it is not only just diversity and being a woman, but diversity in what you are experience in payments around the world.

Kate Fitzgerald (12:47):

So now into the nitty gritty elements of driving your career, and I did want to talk, we touched on it on the first segment, but each of you I might think might have some interesting perspectives on some of the challenges and the obstacles that women face and how women can help other women get through those things. Anusha, what were some of the hotspots that occurred to you on that Fred.

Anusha Ramanujam (13:10):

So early on I got some really good advice. So first two pieces of advice. One was if you find somebody who is willing to learn, invest the time, take the time to share your knowledge because that is going to help you grow to be a successful leader and you will be empowering not just themselves but also yourselves. The second one was do great work but also showcase your work. So I think it is super important everybody in this audience, if you do not already have one, but you should have a hype doc. A hype doc is very different from a resume. A hype doc is like you are jotting down everything that brings that you have done. It could be something really small, it could be a big deal that you worked on, but you are jotting down everything and you are going to use that in conversations career, true career development conversations.

(14:01)

For example, in my hype doc I will write, I am the best deal maker in the company and here are 10 examples. I am the best advocate for my team and here is why. When you do that, when you have a hype doc, I can tell you that it really helps you get over something that many of us may struggle with, which is an imposter syndrome. Because when you have a hype doc, I will give you another example. If there is a job description that is posted generally you may have observed that if there are 15 requirements, women will check to say typically like, okay, do I meet one through 15 of those job requirements? Oh, I do not need that so I am not going to apply it. Having a hype doc helps you look at like, okay, I did this, it is not exactly the same but I can port this to that skill and maybe it will convince you to take that shot and raise your hand to the point made earlier and take that.

(14:51)

I have done that many times. It is not that I have always been successful, but taking that shot helps you do that. And when you have this share that and you are communicating that you are going to learn your insights, you are going to showcase your work, you are going to get a lot of insights from people and many people are going to learn from you. Just last week I took a shot and it did not quite pan out, but I shared that with my team and they were like, that really resonated because somebody else was like, I was on the fence and I was like, I am not sure if I can get out of my comfort zone and do that, but I am like, here is why I did that. It does not always work, but sometimes it does and sometimes it lands and maybe it will put you on the radar for the next new opportunity.

Kate Fitzgerald (15:27):

Great point. Because we forget about, you talk about the perfection syndrome, the imposter syndrome, and then there is something about that they are, say it has been said that men are less worried about failure. Whitney, do you want to talk about how women put themselves into tougher situations than they might need to?

Whitney Stewart Russell (15:47):

Yeah, I think that is right. I think all really good points. I think that women are talented, they are multifaceted, and we do not take as many shots that are leaps as our counterparts do. So I think that again, it goes to finding those opportunities for new assignments, new projects to really stretch yourself. Men would never bat an eye at saying, hey, I have never done that before, but I am going to give it a whirl and I will probably be great at it. We need to tell ourselves we will probably be great at everything too and get out there and try. I think personally, whether it was early in my career or even lately, you will find advocates and people that you may not even see as advocates that are saying try something. I loved the comment before about coaching women to take assignments and women saying they are not ready yet. I would say stretch your bounds. If you feel like you are not ready, you probably are largely ready, give it a shot. And if you fail, it is okay. If you do a good job and you are contributing to your organization, stretch assignments that do not go exactly perfectly will not be your demise. So take a shot, you will learn something no matter what.

Kate Fitzgerald (17:03):

So we have been through a lot in the last couple of years. We had the pandemic. I felt like women were really getting a lot of momentum and the payments thing that we were covering before then. And then the pandemic came and there was a sense of burnout, there was a definite sense of burnout. People were working around the clock trying to keep the payments flowing as you mentioned it. So it is a lifeblood of our world and there has also been fallout afterward of this sort of quiet quitting. So now my question is about motivating these. We are talking again about the next generation of women and how do you get we, we have come through the burnout and maybe the quiet quitting was, gee, is this worth it? I killed myself. What am I getting out of it? We are seeing a lot of, in some cases economic uncertainty. Both of you are in positions now where you are trying to, how are you infusing energy and optimism and bringing women forward in this atmosphere?

Anusha Ramanujam (17:54):

I will share this. These are real issues and I am sure many of us here in this room have gone through that. It was personal anecdote like 2021, I was at Square and I think it was about seven months that I had gone without having a lead. And two of my peers and I co-leading a global organization of I think 40 people while still managing our own teams, managing our own work, doing IC work and management work, trying to hit our OKRs. Around the same time, somebody on my team decided to step away from work to focus on family, so wanted to support them. Another employee also on my team wanted to take that role and vacate another role, which I am like, okay. And that was a time when people were resigning and I am like, okay, hiring was a challenge. Another person raised her hand.

(18:46)

I want a stretch opportunity and invested a lot of the time despite everything else. So I am sure burnout happened, probably worked through it. And what really helped was having leadership and we finally got a lead, very she, Karen Redwood, she is fantastic. So what she comes, when you have the ability to come in and say, take a breath, it is okay to say no, it is okay to embrace the flexibility that your company lends you. It is okay to do more async communication, maybe schedule that email, maybe work whenever you want to schedule, send that slack schedule, send that email. I took a vacation and it was a big deal for me to not check my email for the whole week. And it was great. And when you have that investment from leadership and your colleagues and mainly leadership when it is coming into say, bring stability while trying to accomplish scale, I think that is very important.

(19:45)

And especially when we are, and now it is people are in different, people have different priorities. As I said, as women, we wear multiple hats and payments. But when you have that confidence that somebody is investing in you, somebody is investing that it is okay, put yourself first and do great work and the outcomes will come and then you cover for other people. Like somebody on my team, her kids got sick and both of got neurovirus and then she got it. I am like, okay, I am going to step in and cover you. I got you. Just like you are, you are going to have me have my bag when I am away from you. So when you have that real teamwork, real teamwork and it is coming and it is like it is truly in the DNA of how you work. It is not just, oh yeah, we have very flexible culture and come join us. No, it is truly demonstrated. You can see that and it truly makes a difference.

Kate Fitzgerald (20:35):

That is a kind of an organizational chemistry that is very difficult to make happen. Whitney, do you have any thoughts on that?

Whitney Stewart Russell (20:42):

Yeah, so at Fiserv we are probably a little ahead of the come back to the office curve. So we are largely all back in our offices during the pandemic we consolidated offices to just a couple handfuls of core hubs and it is not been super easy to get people to come back. But I think it goes back to you talk about how do you motivate people post pandemic and how do you want to create excitement? We had to do the same thing getting people back into the office. And I actually think it is helped us to create kind of really burning platforms, things that we are working on that will make a difference for consumers or small businesses and anchor it in the customer, but the customer or the user in the middle of the table and it creates an excitement. And we have actually found that by bringing people together and being able to say, hey, let us all get in a room together and talk about a problem solve together, it does naturally create teamwork and excitement.

(21:37)

And I think in doing that as leaders, we all have the opportunity to take people that are doing really great work and highlighted across that team, my CIO and I twice a week stand up with a team that are working on a building the next gen piece of technology for us. And there is some really young up and coming players on that team. And rather than us step in and say, okay, you should do it this way, we say, okay, what have you done this week? What are you doing? How are you leading the teams? And create advocacy within the teams from the lowest level of your work no matter if you manage people or not. If you can get someone excited about your burning platform and what you are doing for your customers, I think it creates this fire and I think it gets people enthusiastic and they want to come to work and they want to spend time making a difference. And I think with payments, we all have the chance to touch millions and millions of people, all people really, and how they are living their lives and how we are enabling things. So it can be a really exciting thing to be a part of.

Kate Fitzgerald (22:34):

And then you touched on getting these young people excited and then they are really excited and they really want to move ahead immediately with their careers. Anusha, do you have any thoughts on that?

Anusha Ramanujam (22:42):

Yeah, I think we need to move away from advancement being very one-dimensional, aka I am getting promoted to the next level. So at our company we have this performance management system, it is called the six box. So it looks at potential for growth and performance over time, capacity for growth and performance over time and kind of like the top box will be amplified growth. Traditionally people will be like, oh yeah, that means this person is ready for promotion. Or if somebody just got promoted then oh, you can not cap classify them as amplified growth. Why not? I challenge that my lead and I challenge that we are like maybe amplify growth means different things. Maybe somebody is in IC today and may want to take the step to become a people lead. Maybe somebody wants to go represent Square at external industry forums and speak. Maybe somebody wants to, I have somebody who is a very technical, does payment certifications. I am like, come shadow us on how to do a product deal. How do we do a commercial deal? Maybe develop a different skillset. I think it is very important to be able to say that how do you grow? And this helps get over some of that, like the impatience pieces. Well, okay, I am ready and I want to go. But actually yes, and step into different roles, take on different stretch opportunities and the other rewards will come be that a promo, be that managing a team be that whatever that amplify growth represents for you.

Kate Fitzgerald (24:07):

Great.

Whitney Stewart Russell (24:08):

I will go back to something I said earlier is that I think you have to know so many different parts of payments to be successful. And I will often have young people come, I just had this happen last week with someone that works for in my team and they are like, okay, I have been doing this for 18 months, it is time for me to be promoted. And I think you have to stand back and say, okay, well what have you learned? What do you want to learn next? What sorts of experiences you had a chance to be a part of, what kinds of projects you had a chance to be a part of? And make sure that your younger teammates understand that you have to weave this kind of framework of skills around payments. I think to be truly successful in this industry, you can not just be a marketer, you can not just be a technologist.

(24:52)

You have to kind of know a little bit of everything. So I think promotions, there is this generational expectation of rapid promotion and titles being really important. I would love to go back to the, this is going to really date me, but the dotcom days where nobody had a title and you really had functional things that came after your name that were exciting things you were working on. I would love to see us get to a place where we go back to those days where it is not about I am the VP or the director of X, Y, and Z, but I am the leader of this cool thing we are working on. And I think getting young people to say, hey, what is that next cool thing I want to work on is going to be great for all of us as leaders and payments, but also bringing up this next generation of leaders and making sure and can be successful in the industry.

Kate Fitzgerald (25:45):

Great input. So interesting about the generational issues. And so I think we are going to wrap it up with one more. We wanted to touch about to touch on inclusion, which is another big piece of advancing women. And over the several years that we have been doing this, we have observed this happening. It is fascinating and I tell me what you have seen in terms of inclusion. How far have we come and how far do we have to go, do you think?

Anusha Ramanujam (26:10):

So we call it inclusion and diversity as opposed to diversity and inclusion. It is a subtle difference, but it really focuses inclusion of the different communities that we have. We have these workshops. I recently did one called Interrupting Bias and there is another one called Allyship. So interrupting bias looks at, you know, have the different biases. It could be perception bias, it could be constructed criteria. And it starts with an exercise to say, take a look at your own trusted 10, your personal board of advisors, what is the makeup of that? And everybody does that. And then you look at to, okay, ethnicity, background, experience, age, what is the makeup and is it skewed in a very different, in one particular dimension? That is one. Second one is let us say you are given $500 and you are given a list of privileges, what would you buy with that $500? And it really starts getting you thinking about, oh my God, I did not even know this was a privilege, or oh my God, this resonates because yeah, I have had to fight for this.

(27:10)

So when everybody went through this exercise and every lead and also many other people who are not leads at the company go through this, it truly brings that perspective of why having diverse perspectives and divergent opinions and difference in backgrounds and experience is super important. And then it becomes less of a, oh, HR sourcing go higher. Diversely, oh business. It is a joint effort. It is no more, no longer just a check the box exercise. Everybody is truly making this part of your hiring plan because you want to bring that in. And it really applies to everybody who is trying to make a career into this, especially with payments. I think it resonates a lot. Again, with younger folks who are coming in, they are like, yep, this is a great way for me to understand that somebody is truly valuing divergent perspectives. Somebody is truly giving me something where I can apply my growth mindset and learn and continue from there. Excellent. So Whitney, do you want to wrap it up on the sort of strategic approach to inclusion that we might be finally finding our way into?

Whitney Stewart Russell (28:08):

Yeah, we had the luxury during the pandemic. It is Fiserv hired Korn Ferry. And if you guys have not subscribed to Korn Ferry is Insights work around diversity and inclusion, it is fantastic. It is free, fantastic podcast format, it is really good. But we have basically taken some really awesome tools that they gave us around interview questions and kind of competency test and even leadership and management skills have really pushed leaders to say, are you really valuing inclusion? Are you really valuing diversity and are you doing that day to day? And those tools have been amazing. I think it allows from multiple levels of leadership within Fiserv, the chance to kind of gut check yourselves. We all have biases, every single one of us. And I think that if you have a framework to work within that ask you that you ask yourself the right questions on are you really getting enough diversity and thought and what you are working on for it to be truly excellent work?

(29:15)

Because I think at the end of the day, that is what diversity inclusion is all about, is creating truly excellent balanced work that has been huge for us and we have put it into our leadership programs. We have a program called Leading Fiserv and Fiserv Leading Women where we are taking kind of director level women and preparing them for that next opportunity director level, people of color and preparing them for the next opportunity. And we use that framework to really ask the tough question. We also do it in practice every day, where as if we are working on a project, making an investment decision, if we are all agreeing to something, we will nominate someone in the room to be the dissenter to make sure that we have not, we are having balance of thought, which has been really huge.

Kate Fitzgerald (30:00):

That is great. Well I feel like every time we do these things, we are just getting started when it is time to stop, but that is for exciting for next year. Thank you so much. Wrap us up.