Penny Crosman, Executive Editor, Technology at American Banker (Moderator)
Amy Brady, Chief Information Officer at KeyBank
Anna Marrs, Group President, Global Commercial Services and Credit & Fraud Risk at American Express
Transcription:
Penny Crosman (00:06):
Good morning. Thank you so much. Good to be here. I'm Penny Crosman with American Banker. It is an honor to be here with Anna Marrs and Amy Brady. Anna is one of the most powerful women in finance, and Amy is one of the most powerful women in banking. And a few things about them. Anna overseas a number of divisions at American Express including B2B payments, working capital a PO, automation spend management businesses. You can just say I work at Amex. That's good. And she also oversees fraud and credit risk. And Amy oversees 5,000 employees. She oversees all of technology. She also oversees real estate and recently had to, was charged with downsizing by that 30%, which sounds like an interesting challenge, but we're going to talk about issues around advancing women in finance and technology and we're going to talk a little bit about AI and we're going to talk a little bit about being on bank boards or being on other boards, not on bank boards.
(01:18)
So welcome to both of you. So I guess first of all, we have talked here for many years, decades really about the need to advance women in this industry and all of the challenges that have historically existed. And it seems like in some ways things have gotten better and maybe not in all ways have things gotten better. And there's definitely data that shows that having diversity on teams and in leadership is of benefit to an organization. So does this conversation about the need to advance women in banking still need to happen or has enough progress been made that we can kind of move on to a different conversation?
Amy Brady (02:05):
I'm like, Anna, do you want to go first? She goes, no, you. So what answers with that first? Well, first off, penny, it's great to be here. It's great to be here with Ana, and I thought the panel before us was amazing. They did a great job and hopefully we will hit some additional themes to add to the conversation. I've often said I've been in this industry a long time now, a little bit more than I'd like to admit. And I'd often said that I wish we weren't still having to have this conversation. But the reality is we do still need to have the conversation. There are parts of our industry that are still not as diverse as they need to be, and it's all of our collective responsibility to change that and figure out what are the root causes to that and continually be working to counter those trends.
(02:53)
So if you think about parts of technology, technology does tend to be a male dominated part of our industry, although you're seeing some movement there. But as they talked about in the earlier session, you get to a middle kind of level. And we do see women choosing to opt out. And I think there are other parts of our industry, investment, banking, trading, they were just talking about that where women may step aside at certain parts when they get to certain levels of their career. So I think we have to work on what are those counter activities that we can be very intentional about to help us continue to promote women. I also believe it starts with all of us in this room, people helped us along the way. People maybe didn't help us along the way and you saw and we all learned from that and overcame those things. So how do we change the narrative for the next generation or even our peer group as we go through and move along and things shift, shift and change. But hopefully, I don't know, I have two daughters who are early in the workforce. I wish that the conversation wasn't having to happen and maybe by the time they reach my level of years of experience, they won't be having the conversation. But right now, let's make sure we are having the conversation so we continue to get women in the room. So
Penny Crosman (04:13):
Just a quick follow up, sorry, quick follow up. Something you mentioned that in technology it is still an issue and it seems to me whenever you look at the data around who's graduating colleges with STEM kinds of degrees, that the percentages of girls with math and science and tech degrees is still really low and it's actually smaller than it was 10 years ago, I would say. So where do you think you change that dynamic? Does it have to be in elementary school, is it in high school, is in college, or is it later sort of re-skilling people?
Amy Brady (04:50):
All of the above. So I think it starts with all of us making sure that as you're putting your children into, if you have daughters, as you're putting them into elementary school and then middle school and high school, that they are active in the math and sciences if that's their aptitude and that's what they like. But also to be very mindful of the fact that there is social pressure that all of a sudden that's not the cool thing to do. So I remember my oldest daughter at one point, she got to middle school and she said, mom, I'm terrible at math. She had had straight A's in math. I'm like, what happened overnight? Well, overnight she all of a sudden was in this co-ed institution and she succumbed to some peer pressure and it was stunning. I was like, how did that happen? So I mean I think we have to watch out for those things, but I think it's all of the above. Heather talked about she has a political science degree, I have a degree in music and a degree in psychology. Go figure. So I think we also have to look for alternative sources of talent. You don't have to have a degree in it to be an IT specialist. You don't have to have a degree in economics or finance to be a really successful banker. So I think we have to look for that diversity of experience, but that have the aptitude and the skillset that can be built upon.
Penny Crosman (06:06):
Yeah, Kathy Besant who used to head technology Bank of America used to say she can run technology but she can't use it. So she always needed some I hope.
Amy Brady (06:15):
I love Kathy. I'm a step above that. I can use it and run it. No, I'm just kidding. Little competitive. And I would say that if she was here, by the way, we're friends.
Anna Marrs (06:23):
I just wanted to add on that first question about why we need to continue to care and we all have read all the research, the infinite research that says that diversity matters in decision-making. But in finance or banking and finance, I think it matters even more because we're at our core a risk business. And what the research tells us is that when you have diverse groups of people in a room, you cover more of the landscape of all human understanding with their knowledge base and you make better decisions that's core. And so that's what we do. We make risk decisions and it makes us make better decisions. And I was just thinking as I was listening to Amy's answer, before I joined Amex, I worked for an emerging markets bank called Standard Charter Bank. And the last role I had there, I ran the region of Ozone in South Asia. So super interesting countries, when you take over a job, you go on the road show and you go to all these countries and you meet the teams.
(07:19)
And I discovered that when I walked into a room and everybody was the same. So either they were all from the same business unit, they were all the corporate bankers instead of the retail bankers or they were all men or they were all from the same schools or they all had worked together on that same little boat for 30 years that the hair on the back of my neck would go up because it's like something's wrong here. We are not managing risk well. And even in countries I got so fed up with that I actually ended up setting targets. So I remember I'm talking to the CEO of the Bangladesh business and saying, you need two women, you need at least two women on your management team by the end of the year because there was a rich layer of talent one layer below and with a target, it was amazing. You can make progress and overall the risk management environment materially improved. So that's why we have to care. We're a risk business helps us make better risk decisions.
Amy Brady (08:18):
And I add one thing to that as well because that is so important. And I also would add not only in managing risk, but it is statistically proven, you cannot innovate if you surround yourself with people who look like you, think you act like you and have the same experiences as you cannot, you can incrementally improve. But if you want to innovate, you have to have different perspectives, contrarian points of view, different skillsets at the table that bring a different way of thinking about the problem. You will create a much better solution for your enterprise.
Penny Crosman (08:53):
So would you say you also wouldn't want all female teams just as much as you wouldn't want all male teams?
Amy Brady (08:58):
Yeah, well I would actually. And I would also say that you wouldn't want everyone with the same background as Anna was talking about from one part of the institution. If that's the only experience they bring to the table, having that diversity really makes a difference.
Penny Crosman (09:16):
So it seems like at the highest levels there's still kind of a disparity in the number of women in c-suite roles, top leadership roles. Is this an issue that's limited to finance that's specific to finance or would you say it's more of a societal issue or why do you think that continues to be the case?
Anna Marrs (09:41):
I'll go and start this one. I was looking at our data at the American Express data in advance of this panel and the surface. There's some good numbers here. So Amex is the company, we're 54% overall women. And then you go up a level and you top senior vice president and above the top couple layers of the company we're 40% women. So that's pretty good. And then I was looking at our board of directors, we have some incredibly impressive women on our board and we're 29% women at the board level. And I was thinking, good job us. But then I saw the pattern obviously, which is the same pattern that we see again and again. There's even in education that there's been all these articles recently about the number of women coming out of college and how many more there are. But then as you go up, the leadership ranks, it begins to narrow.
(10:30)
So I think it's, it's everywhere. It's in all of these spaces. And the sign behind us as we're going to talk about tools, and I think that one of the tools that drives this is our assessment processes, which are evolving, but I believe need to evolve more quickly. We often a sense assess confidence a lot informally to remove the ranks when more competence-based assessment frameworks can make a difference being clear on what exactly the job spec is. Having a panel interviews, you get multiple perspectives to stop that pattern of promotion where it just gets thinner at the top.
Amy Brady (11:10):
I think you said it really well. I would say the same thing at key with the percentages where we mirror you guys as well. So is it a societal issue? I mean we could talk about that probably for a long time. I'll take it again to the tech side of things, which is a big portion of my job, the Fortune 500. There are less than 20% CIOs at the table. We still look around Fortune 500 CEOs are women as well represented. We seem to go where we hit some levels of optimism and then things change again and then some levels of optimism. So I do think there is more that we have to work on across the board, but I also think it comes down to choice too. So let's also make sure that we all understand that. And for some women, that is not the choice that they want to make.
Penny Crosman (12:02):
Because there are women who decide to have children and stay home rather than.
Amy Brady (12:05):
Look, I don't want to say that. It's just because you have children, you may have other things in your life, in your family, in your priorities that you say, Hey, I've gotten to a certain level of my career and my success is defined by X. One of the things that I think is really important, whether you have children or not for all women and for men too, but since we're talking about women, is that you define what success looks like for you and how you execute that path is your choice. No one else's choice. And I know when my children were little, I traveled, I was with Bank of America, I traveled every single week and I know I had women who looked at me who were at my children's school and said, she must be a terrible mother. Well, I had to get over that. They weren't going to define success for me. I had to define success. Now as you at a different phase in my life, I can say success can look a different way, but that's a personal choice and you have to make those choices.
Anna Marrs (13:12):
All I would add on that, and I completely agree, men and women, we have to make the choices in our life that lead to ultimately happiness. You only go around once and all that. I'm very thoughtful at work about those. I think about them as, I call them breakdown moments, by which I mean, and you all will have had these experiences. Something has broken down and you are about to have a breakdown. So it's like the childcare failure or my husband had surgery a few years ago and he wasn't recovering and was supposed to go to Hong Kong breakdown. And there's those or other ones, obviously there's the ones during pregnancy, I was trying to make partner at McKinsey and my baby was a month early. Breakdown baby's fine, she's 15 now. But those breakdown moments, those can be moments when women say it's just too hard, I can't do it. And the company can think through the tools that we all have to help women through those breakdown moments. If you get to the weekend or you've thought about it for six months and it's the choice you want to make, of course, but it's in that moment of crisis. So like emergency childcare provision, bereavement leave, great parental leave policies, those are tools.
Amy Brady (14:34):
Elder care.
Anna Marrs (14:35):
Elder care.
Amy Brady (14:36):
Because as your parents get older.
Anna Marrs (14:38):
They can help you manage, they can help your people manage those breakdown moments and not make a wrong short-term decision. The long-term, we'll make our choices, but those short-term moments we can help our people through.
Amy Brady (14:49):
Really good point.
Penny Crosman (14:51):
To what extent has American Express done that? Can you give some examples of that.
Anna Marrs (14:55):
Yeah, my favorite, which has sparked all kinds of long-term conversations is of course parental leave. My kids are 15 and 17 now, and I thought with my older one that we were having a baby, right? My husband and I. But then all of a sudden he's back to work a week later and I have a baby. You know what I mean? And there's the shared responsibility in those early years really shape who's going to do what for years to come. But now at Amex we have 20 weeks gender neutral parental leave, and then you can add six to eight more depending on how you give birth, if you actually give birth as well. So the birth giver gets more and men are taking it. It is now normal for a new father to take 20 weeks of parental leave. And someone was chuckling about it the other day. She's like, yeah, so-and-so is coming back from parental leave and he's feeling very insecure. He's asking questions like, oh, what if they did that person get promoted while I was away? And how do I make sure that I get the most important projects when I get back? And I was just like, oh, equality, it is coming. No, we're all going to have that today. Welcome to the party. Welcome. So parental leave is critical. Yeah.
Penny Crosman (16:15):
How about you, Amy? Do you offer anything at KeyBank to help support?
Amy Brady (16:19):
We do. And the evolution has been remarkable. Although I've already texted our head of HR and said, I've heard some companies here are a little ahead of us, but the same thing. I mean, look, I remember, this is embarrassing. My daughter is 26, my oldest, I remember taking a phone call while I was in labor.
Anna Marrs (16:38):
Actually in labor.
Amy Brady (16:39):
Actually in labor.
Anna Marrs (16:41):
But, If she's 26, was it like a landline?
Amy Brady (16:43):
Oh no, no. It was one of those big asphalt that they said were mobile, but it was, you had to lift weights to be able to hold it. Wow. We were going through a merger. I was with Nations Bank at the time. We were going through a merger and I was part of the merger team. There was an issue, but I took it, shame on me. I took the call. Times have changed. I think Anna's right, all of us need to be constantly looking about how do we create the tools, the environment for underrepresented groups of people to succeed in our institutions.
Penny Crosman (17:24):
Sure. Well, for both of you, have there been certain kinds of tools or assistances that you have gotten that have helped you in your career? Let's start with you, Amy.
Amy Brady (17:36):
I think we've all been a part of development programs, mentorship programs, all of those things. And I think those are really good and key has lots of them that we use today and leverage today. I did like the comment about be careful about all of a sudden one of your top performers could be in five of those programs at the same time and going, oh my gosh, and you squash them. So I think that was a really, really important observation. I think when I look back on my career, it was experiences that were the most pivotal and the most challenging. And I think that, and when I look back and say what helped me progress along my career, it was those times when I was asked to do something that made my stomach churn because I thought, I'm not capable of doing that role. I might've had 50% or 60% or 70% of the skills that were required and I knew I was going to have to grow when I look back.
(18:35)
Those were the moments that made the most impact. And quite frankly, I say this all the time in my job today, running all of tech and back office and all of the things that I run, security and things like that. I'm not qualified to run my job today, meaning I constantly have to learn to keep pace with what's going on. So that having those experiences that taught me to continue to grow now also helps me put people in those situations to tell someone and give them the confidence that they can do this. And then make sure you have the environment around them to help them along the way.
Penny Crosman (19:14):
And what about when someone really isn't ready or capable of a particular job, how do you?
Amy Brady (19:21):
Well, I mean, I think as leaders, we have to go back to honest comment around competencies. You're looking at people's competencies. Don't put someone in a role that they're not ready for or that they cannot do because that's not going to help their career because they're going to fail. I mean, it's all very performance-based, but I do think you can nudge and identify talent and put them into situations that can grow their skills.
Penny Crosman (19:47):
How about you? Has anything helped you to climb the corporate ladder.
Anna Marrs (19:52):
And it's going to come back to another tool, another corporate tool that we can deploy and a sort of good news, bad news ask. But I think the most transformational help I got along the way was when I was working my way up that ladder at McKinsey. So in a professional services environment, I was out for my first maternity leave and my evaluator who was a woman, and this is the theme about women helping other women called me and said, we want you to come in for your performance review. And I had just been on leave for two months. I was in the UK, so it's six months leave, yay. And I thought instantly, because I'm a woman, I'm going to be fired, so why does she want to see me in person? Must be bad news. And I came in and she said, in the evaluation committee we talked about you and we said, you will be a partner at the firm. I was an engagement manager, so I was several levels away one day. And so we want to promote you now early when you're on maternity leave so you can come back as a junior partner. I don't have to start again. And it was so transformational, like the belief, the advocacy, that it was okay, even though I had a tiny baby, to think that I might be ambitious again one day I could fit in my old clothes and be ambitious again.
(21:12)
It was extremely motivating and it carried me for some time. And I was just lucky to be in an office where there were some women partners. And when you look around your organizations just where there were your woman, woman, a woman of color, when you get to those rarefied levels and there's no one like you who understands who advocates for you, it gets very, very lonely and it's practically extremely helpful if they understand your perspective and can be part of your voice. So the ask and the tool is all these kind of women's networks, we call them colleague networks at amex, we have a very active women's network and senior women's network. And so the ask is invest in them because they make a huge difference to the people that you're mentoring and developing. And the thing that's horrible about that ask is it puts the burden of making the change back on you as opposed to the organization. It's even more of a burden often for women of color because there's fewer of you. So you have to do more of the lifting and that you're busy doing other things like trying to do your job. But the more that you can make the time, invest behind those networks, I found them an incredibly valuable tool for me. And they are an investment. So it's a pain, but that's just, I think it's a critical tool and will be forevermore.
Penny Crosman (22:34):
Alright, well I want to make sure we talk a little bit about AI because it's such a big powerful force in all of our companies right now. Do you think that the advancement of AI, especially generative AI, does that provide opportunities for women or is it a disadvantage for women? Because as we talked about, they are underrepresented in tech generally, and I think that includes AI. Let's start with you Amy.
Amy Brady (23:02):
So I think we're at the very infant stages around how generative AI is going to change the world. And of course there's a lot of hype and with every new technology we go through this hype curve, it's going to change everything. Everybody's going to lose their job. By the way, you'll all be obsolete tomorrow, which is not the case. So that we go through that hype. I do think as the previous panel talked about, I mean we're investigating, I'm sure all your firms are different ways to use the tools in a controlled way. I think we have to be very careful, very, very careful about how to use these tools. They're extremely powerful. But we already know the public tools can hallucinate, they can give you answers that aren't correct and you can repeat them and they think then they become fact. You can feed it incorrect information.
(23:49)
So there's lots of things you have to be careful about. You can train it bias even if you don't think you're training these tools bias. So all of those things that we have to be careful about. However, at the same time, is it going to replace some tasks that are there today? Absolutely. Will it reshape roles? Absolutely. And I think it's our responsibility as leaders to help our teams and our employees across all of our capabilities understand how to build the skillsets to use these tools and also to then go through the adaptive process of changing their roles. So I think you have to help your people be, we call it future ready, whatever you want to call it, but you have to give your teams and teammates in all levels, by the way, this isn't just senior levels, these are entry level roles that are going to be reshaped. So how do we continue bringing people into entry level roles to learn our industry? If these tools start to replace parts of those entry level roles, you're going to have to restructure things. You have to rethink about things. And that takes work and it takes intention. So as we learn from these tools, we also need to really be cognizant of what it is doing to our workforce.
Anna Marrs (25:03):
I would add just, and I agree with all that. Same in terms of the pilot and the test and the caution as well as a belief in the long-term opportunity we had most companies have an annual strategy motion. We had our annual strategy board last week, and the number of times that ai, generative AI was said in the meeting, I lost count at a certain point. It's a topic of huge interest at the board level. So read up so that you can talk the lingo and be in those conversations because it's a hot topic and insert yourself. That's one thing that I would say. And then sometimes I think about the history of productivity tools and who benefits and women, we've been big beneficiaries over the last couple hundred years of productivity tools. And an example of that is domestic technology. So I read it in an economist article years ago that said that working mothers today actually spend more time with their children than mothers who stayed home did in the 1950s. Why? Because you have a dishwasher, you have home delivery groceries, you have all this home technology, which means that things get done faster. And so if anyone's going to make use of a productivity tool, which ultimately generative AI is, it's going to be a group of busy women. So I'm not pessimistic about generative AI and gender.
Amy Brady (26:24):
I'm not either. And Anna, I think what you just said around reading up and thinking about it, and all of us, depending on what your role you're in today, think about how it can reshape your role and your work and the work that you're doing or the end-to-end process that you're a part of. Be a the person that helps create the application of the tools versus waiting for it to happen to you.
Penny Crosman (26:46):
Alright, well, we are kind of running low on time, but I wanted to ask both of you if there's something you would do differently today, looking back on your career, something you would've done differently 10 years ago, 20 years ago, what would it be?
Anna Marrs (27:03):
Do you have one?
Amy Brady (27:05):
Go ahead.
Anna Marrs (27:07):
I've loved my career. I've gotten to live all over the world. It's been incredibly interesting. I love my job now. No huge regrets. It's always about just that little bit more confidence. And it's a remarkable thing. That topic persists so late into your career. I've run businesses all over the world. I run a $15 billion P and l, but still the confidence it is deep in women and how we're brought up to take less risk, to be more cautious, to play it safe. And what I would say to my, I would undo some of that indoctrination if I could and just make sure that I always brought the same level of confidence.
Penny Crosman (27:50):
And where does that confidence come from? Do you think? You just grow?
Anna Marrs (27:53):
You know whatz always helps me? No, actually this is the thought technique. I'll be sitting there thinking, I don't know how to do this or that. Stop and look to your right and look to your left. And it's like, well, am I less good at this than that guy and that guy? No. So let's go. So it's that just to have some perspective in reality and you can psych yourself up to be where you are. You're great at what you do.
Amy Brady (28:17):
I think I too feel so fortunate for the career that I've had, the opportunities that I've had, the different experiences I wish I had learned earlier. The comment I made earlier about defining success and you being the owner of that. I think all too often I worried about what people would think when I took this step or that step. I notice I'm going sideways. I'm not going vertical versus ladder. I don't look at my career path as being traditional at all. And so I was always worried about what everybody would think about when I took X, Y, Z assignment. And now I look back and I'm like, it was the most brilliant thing ever that I took those assignments, but I just didn't know it at the time. So maybe it's confidence or maybe it's just again, accepting that we are in charge of our own careers and you have the ability to say yes and no, and just go forward and do the best you can and what you've been asked to do versus worrying about what everyone else is thinking. By the way, they're probably not even thinking about you, even though I thought they were.
Anna Marrs (29:21):
But in the little bit of time we've gotten to know each other, hanging out for this panel, you strike me as someone who's chosen roles for learning. And if you're choosing a job because you're like, I need to be good at this, I need to learn about that. It might not always be a straight slope up. It can be. I think about it as a series of s-curves, you take a little bit of a step down that you're getting on the right S. So I think it's a great lesson for everybody, the learning focus.
Penny Crosman (29:51):
Well, great advice. Amy and Anna, thank you so much for this great conversation.
Anna Marrs (29:55):
Thank you.