Category: Podcast

We believe that technology has the potential to unite people. On Episode 14 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we spoke to Milkah Wachiuri, the Chief Growth Officer at Cellulant, who shares that belief. She shared her insights on how FinTech can connect the African continent through seamless payments and how Cellulant’s solutions are set to transform the way business is done across borders. 

How important has it been in Africa to have a single digital payment platform?

My favourite statement on this one always is that Africa is not the United States of Africa. It’s 54 sovereign nations that run independently. That means different currencies, different regulations, or different customer needs, because people operate differently. Top that off with the fact that not everyone is banked on the continent and not everybody is going to be making payments online. The majority of people who are digital have mobile wallets where they would store their cash. A lot of these markets have a few exceptions, and Kenya is a prominent example of that. Each of these markets have different nuances too, so from a payments perspective it’s a real nightmare. 

On the continent it’s not seamless. It’s not just one connection, you have to put all of these payment methods and types together in different markets with all those different regulations and jurisdictions and try to make them work together. Our work at Cellulant is to make that madness simple. We make it easier for a merchant who works with Cellulant to operate in all of those markets by using an API that allows them to pay out and pay in and do so at a pre-agreed time. By giving you our API we can settle your accounts at a pre agreed time in your currency of choice, both online and in store. If you’re providing a service we’re able to support you on that. We partner with banks and mobile network operators to make that happen. 

If someone was looking to join a start-up like Cellulant, what advice would you give them?

Do it. Even through my experience here at Cellulant I’ve managed to get a lot of experience in a short time. When you get into a start-up at the right time the world is your oyster, right? Because businesses at that point are not caged by hard and fast rules, there are all sorts of exciting things happening. You can literally move into whichever department you want to and you can experiment as much as you want. 

If you’re looking to move into a start-up, look for what I call the trifecta. If you’re judging whether this is a good thing to do, firstly, look at your boss. Do they genuinely care about the work that the company is doing and the work that they’re doing? Secondly you should look at whether the company is in an industry that is growing, because you will definitely grow as a result. It can’t just be any startup. Do a bit of research to see if this is an industry that seems to be headed somewhere. The third consideration is whether or not you love figuring things out, often from scratch, because nothing is built in a startup. If you like nice boxes where everything is spelled out about what needs to be done, you will not enjoy working in a start-up. If you love figuring things out though, if you like to build from scratch, if you like to be your own boss and do your own stuff, you’re gonna have a wonderful time in a startup. 

What’s the biggest misconception that people have about your field of work?

When you think about the FinTech payment space that I’m in, you would think that the work is done, right? Surprisingly, we are very far from getting done. Cash remains a major form of payment in the continent – it’s the largest competitor for any payments business. 90% of transactions, especially in retail, are still happening in cash. There’s so much space to digitise in the continent. 

We need people to continue to invest, not just in businesses that are trying to get things running across different sectors of payments, but also in good talent if we want to grow these businesses. We also need good governance to really really grow the continent. If you look at digitising payments and the impact it has on economies, it’s clear how much of a difference it could make in the African continent. If we could utilise all the wonderful resources we have and all the wonderful talent we have too, we could harness a lot of progress and opportunities for young talent across the board. There’s a lot of work to be done, despite the noise all over the continent, and especially in the payment space. We have barely scratched the surface, and there’s much to be done.

To learn more about Milkah’s work in connecting Africa through FinTech, tune into The Disruptive Mindset Podcast here. 

Here at Disruptive Hiring we consistently champion female leaders in the tech space. On Episode 13 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we had the pleasure of talking to the CEO of Nimbla Ltd, Elizabeth Jenkin, about creating better gender diversity in the industry. Elizabeth is also a Principal Co-Founder of Lift As You Climb UK, which is a networking non-profit that supports women in the workplace. Together we unpacked the important work that both Disruptive and Elizabeth are doing. Read on for the highlights!

Why is it important for women to network with each other? 

When we started Lift As You Climb, we found that women were typically only networking with people of their own age or in their own industry, which is quite limiting. You don’t learn that way. Networking is very much about passing wisdom forwards and backwards and through generations, and our goal is to facilitate that. 

Women actually network differently to men. They don’t have like these huge networks, they usually have a very tight-knit group that’s almost like a bunch of friends. There’s a spiderweb effect that comes off that close group which the Kellogg School of Management researched a few years ago. That’s what we try to promote within Lift As You Climb, because it creates a community who help each other. People will say introduce you to this person, who can introduce you to that person, and it just keeps growing. Little conversations can create bigger conversations and actually quite big movements. It all starts with asking for help. Our network is incredible because they’re so generous with their time and expertise. 

What impact can mentoring have on women’s careers? 

Finding mentors early on in your career can open so many doors. It will help you navigate your career, whatever gender you are. If you’re in industries that don’t always have relatable role models in front of you, it’s important to go and find them. They can then advise you on what to do in certain situations that you’ve not been through before. 

Women are often offered mentors, but they’re usually men. Are we going to have the same open and honest conversations with senior men that we would with other women? Maybe, maybe not. But research says that women typically want to be mentored by women for broader aspects of their career such as maternity leave or questions like ‘I want to be CEO, how do I get there?’ Having another woman to guide you through that can be invaluable. 

Who have been your biggest role models?

I’ve always had working women around me, and that’s always been a big influence on me. One of my major influences was my grandmother. She had the sharpest intellect of any woman I’ve ever met. She went from being a governess to being a land girl, and then one thing led to another and she met my grandfather and got married. They were farmers, but in another world, or in another time, she would have had a big career somewhere. She was very humble about it, but she smashed the cryptic crossword every day. 

She focused my sister and I on our careers and supported them. She never wanted us to settle. She wanted us to do work we loved and work hard. Her ambition for us was not to just get married – although that’s a perfectly brilliant outcome – because she wanted more for us. She was the one person in my life that told me things I didn’t want to hear. When I messed up she was there, and she was holding me accountable. Most importantly, she would do it kindly. She would always try to put me back on back on the rails. 

To learn more about Elizabeth’s work at Lift As You Climb and other aspects of her career, tune into Episode 13 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast here.

Chat GPT has taken the world by storm in recent months. In Episode 12 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we spoke to Alex Jimenez, the Managing Principal of Financial Services Consulting at EPAM Systems, to talk about the use of this new technology FinTech. Read on to hear his insights on using generative AI for financial advice.

“Generative AI has created an incredible buzz recently, and it’s starting to get people to think about technology differently. Unfortunately, they often think that they can put anything into generative AI and it’ll give them the answers, which we know isn’t true. Just recently I heard someone tell me that they were going to roll out a bank chatbot that’s connected to Chat GPT, and my reaction was ‘Oh, my God, don’t do that!’ It’s not secure or regulated at all.

Chat GPT is an AI chatbot or language model. It’s all built to answer prompts, but as we’ve seen several times, just because it’s answer seems right doesn’t mean it is. It’s also not built to be giving advice to a banking customer. I see these articles that keep coming up saying ‘I asked Chat GPT what stocks I should buy for the next five years’, and that’s completely the wrong application. Chat GPT was built to give you a grammatically correct sentence using statistical analysis of language, not to tell you how to invest in the stock market.

Funnily enough, one of the things that I first did with Chat GPT was ask it about me. It didn’t find anything about me, but it gave a response saying I had started an agency 20 years ago, that I had just started a FinTech company, and that I had a degree from a university in San Francisco. I knew exactly where the data was coming – it was a former boss of mine, not me. Chat GPT put my name on his biography. I asked ‘what are the sources of this information?’ and it gave me a whole list of sources, all of which were made up. There was a LinkedIn entry which went nowhere because the source didn’t really exist. I clicked on several of the links to websites, but all of them were 404 errors. All of this was made up.

That shows the capability of AI. It can write convincing text, but it isn’t reliable enough to give advice for a bank. God forbid you give someone financial advice from it. Regulators are not going to be happy if you’re giving advice that’s totally incorrect. There are reasons why people are trained for months or years before doing that job, and why advisors have certifications and credentials. Will they be replaced by a Chat GPT type model? Possibly. But not this one. This was not built for that.”

To learn more about the technology emerging in the FinTech space, tune into The Disruptive Mindset Podcast here.

Disruptive Mindset Ep 10 Blog – Creating a Holistic People Function 

On Episode 10 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we spoke to Harshvendra Soin about his work in the ED&I field. As the Global Chief People Officer and Head of Marketing at Tech Mahindra, Harshvendra is responsible for the wellbeing of a large number of people within the company. His initiatives have resulted in an excellent attrition rate thanks to the inclusive culture that Tech Mahindra has. Read on to find out what his secret is!

What’s the secret behind your 14% attrition rate?

I would say it’s the belief in our culture. The way we define culture in our company is that we’re driving positive change, celebrating each moment, and empowering everybody to rise. We’re driving positive change in the lives of our customers, and their customers in turn. We have fun, because you can’t celebrate without enjoyment. And finally, we’re empowering youngsters and creating great human experiences for everyone in the company. It’s not employee engagement or employee experience – we believe in the power of human experience which extend beyond office hours and into your wider personal life. We believe that employees need a user experience in the same way that a customer does. 

When we look at the complete employee lifecycle, from hiring and work environment to their family and hobbies, we try to create moments of truth. It could be personal, professional, or for whole communities. We really believe in being authentic with our employees. I see a lot of companies making noise around these things. I always quote Maya Angelou, who said, ‘people forget what you did, people forget what you say, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ We’re trying to make people feel special. Even the way we write policies and address issues is hyper personalised because we believe that everybody deserves that level of investment from us as an employer. 

We are the number one employer for women in India, and the number one employer for careers. We are huge on diversity and inclusivity, which creates an environment where people thrive. Our internal fulfilment rates have gone from about 40% to 70%, which is the best in the industry, because we give people avenues to build their career. We are trying to address a holistic experience of an employee by using HR tech to enhance the experience. We don’t have any ID cards, we have facial recognition instead, but facial recognition with a twist. It’s also a ‘mood-ometer’ because it recognises moods on people’s faces. It’s completely GDPR compliant because it doesn’t store anything. It can’t tell you the mood of Harsh, but it can tell you the mood of Delhi. We use that to engage with out people and improve their experience. 

Are people enjoying the experience? 

Because we focus on the power of experience, our people are thriving. Tech is a great tool for enhancing the immersive employee experience. Because of the tech we’re using, people don’t have an advantage or disadvantage based on their location. We came out with the world’s first marketplace of talent, because internal job postings are a mess, so nobody applies, people get frustrated and they never get jobs. Our marketplace matches eligible talent with opportunities to upskill themselves, and it allows people to bid on jobs they want.  That gives our employees a chance to get any job that they want within the company. That’s just an example of how we’re creating those immersive human experiences that make a tangible difference to people’s lives. 

What have you done differently that’s made you so successful?

It is an ecosystem. The question of why it was very important. You can’t become a ED&I sensitive company overnight. When we looked at diversity, we asked what kind of diversity we should work on. We went out and said to the world, ‘We are an intentionally diverse and a globally inclusive company.’ Now, when you make a statement like that, people hold you responsible for it. When we look at gender, we recognise three genders. This is in India where people hardly recognise this. We started by putting that statement in our policy, and now we have got 12 active LGBT communities that are advocating for the rights we have on gender. We have 36% women leaders, but we said we will go beyond this. We were the first ones to bring in some groundbreaking policies on LGBTQ+ inclusion too. Publicly declaring our goals keeps us progressive.

You live and breathe this human-centric ethos. How do you keep it going? 

You can’t have these initiatives in isolation, they have to be strung together as the employee value proposition. And our employee value proposition was very clear, we will unleash the potential of people. It says, freedom to explore what you dream and freedom to dream what you want. Our entire ecosystem helps you achieve that. That doesn’t happen overnight. There was a humongous amount of support from leadership and employees to make that happen. We have to justify every decision we make because when we say we’re the best employer for women, people will challenge that. 

An example of how we put that into practice is that we have no reserved parking, except for expectant mothers. We have spaces in every office which are painted pink. When we did that, people asked why. We were very clear that if we want to be a great employer, we have to understand the tribulations of somebody who’s expecting a baby and coming to work. It’s not just needing a crutch, it’s finding the right chair, table, support and ecosystem that they can thrive in. We are not paying lip service to the fact that we want women to come back to work, we are one of the companies that hire a lot of women back into the workforce after maternity leave. We invest in the economic empowerment of women, which supports our holistic view of our people. 

When COVID struck, we believed that we had to go and save lives, not only of our employees or their families, but the communities we work in. We converted our offices into intensive care units. We got medicine, oxygen plants and treatment and we helped save lives. We lost many people, so we said we would employ the next of kin or family member in our workforce to continue to support the families we were involved in. Sometimes you have to look beyond who you are to really sort of create this impact. 

To hear more about the work that Harshvendra is doing, tune into the Disruptive Mindset Podcast here. 

Embodying leadership roles can be a challenge. When it comes to inspiring your team to think outside the box, leading with a creative mindset is one of the best ways to achieve results. On Episode 9 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we spoke to Nicolas Parmaksizian, the Global CEO at Designit, about how his creative outlook has changed the way he leads.

What’s the one misconception people have about your role?

The biggest misconception is that you need to be the best at something or a specialist in something to be a leader. However, having different experiences and being able to connect things from each of your roles is essential for seeing the big picture. The one thing that I do believe is important for leaders is the ability to coach others. The biggest misconception is that you need lots of specific experience behind you, but having a wide set of experiences and the ability to coach is actually far more important.

If somebody asked me to draw the path to being the leader of a creative organisation, I would say there isn’t a standard path. One common thread is a thirst for learning and the ability to translate that knowledge to your team. Building high performing teams is what earns you the right to run an organisation. We’re teaching business students the functions of running a business and not focussing on the softer skills that are instrumental to running a successful team. Leaders should understand their team on a personal level if they want to get the most out of them.

How are you developing creativity and analytical leadership at the same time?

I’m doing a doctorate, and my research is based on the ability to develop mental ambidexterity in leaders. What I mean by ambidexterity is this ability to explore and experiment while exploiting your situation. Leaders need to be great at managing, delivering and operationalizing risk. The human brain isn’t very good at thinking about tomorrow while delivering for today. As leaders though, we’re expected to do both. My vision for developing the next generation of leaders includes working with innovation teams around the world, identifying the challenges that are common across industries and training leaders to disrupt themselves by grasping these paradoxes in order to find creative solutions.

What are you most curious about or interested in at the moment?

I’m fascinated by recent changes in artificial intelligence and how it’s impacting the world of creativity and design. AI allows us to prototype new options and explore things that we might not have thought about before. We’re leveraging the power of technology and data through AI to broaden the spectrum of a designer. What I worry about is that this technology might start to narrow our frame of vision because we’re being fed the same content on a loop, so people’s minds aren’t being opened to new things. Curiosity and learning are essential for progress, and there is a danger that technology will ultimately kill off human creativity. Innovation comes from being exposed to a wide array of stimuli that triggers this creative process. AI gives us an opportunity to accelerate creative output in the short term, but in the longer term, there is also a danger of limiting ourselves by relying on these algorithms.

We’ve been making fun of how students are leveraging this technology to write their essays. I think that’s actually very serious, because the ability to think critically and compose new works is a skill that we should develop, not give up. Just because you’ve got technology that can do it faster, that doesn’t mean we should blindly embrace it. That’s one of the cases in which AI is actively killing our creativity.

How would you disrupt the culture of design?

Culture is an evolving thing. Sometimes an organisation can become a prisoner of its own culture. You shouldn’t think of it as an artefact that you’ve got on a shelf which you continuously polish and preserve. A culture needs to be evolved. The culture of Designit is anchored in values of shared progress and accountability. We’re hugely collaborative, which has led to us stepping from what we call ‘human centred’ to ‘humanity centred’, and thinking about the impact that we have, not only on this immediate audience, but the whole world and future generations. We’ve cultivated a deep sense of responsibility and accountability that permeates our entire culture.

To hear more about the work that Nicolas and the Designit team are doing, tune into The Disruptive Mindset Podcast on Spotify hereand Apple Podcasthere. 

TA and HR are both intrinsically people-based roles. On Episode 8 of the Disruptive Mindset Podcast we spoke to Emily Cooper, the HR lead at IDEO, about how we can use positive mindsets to improve our people’s lives and grow companies from the inside.

How are HR and TA roles currently changing?

It’s a big shift that started with personnel departments. There’s been a lot of discussion previously about the HR role becoming that of a strategic business partner, leading the strategy on people and having that tied into the C suite. We are expected to be innovators, to create value internally and externally. That means we have to get things done right. We can’t be solely focused only on strategy, because there are still basic requirements of a people function that we need to meet too. That means being human, taking the time to listen to employees to understand what they’re going through.

There’s a balance between slowing things down and speeding them up. I’m a big fan of automating and digitising where possible, but actually we still need to be humans in our line of work. I work in a human centred design organisation, so we’re thinking about the balance and the friction between people and tech. We are expected to wear so many hats in HR. We’re supposed to be supporting mental health and advocating for employee needs, as well as balancing our business requirements. There are so many shifting priorities that the expectation is massive, and sometimes it can be difficult to meet all of these expectations and manage our time effectively in such a changeable landscape.

How are you driving this strategy and behaviour?

Our work is truly human centred. We’ve worked with incredible clients to build a positive impact in the world, which is amazing. But what we’re not so good at is telling everyone about it, in order to build out our marketing, and let the world know how we can help them. What we’re doing internally is making sure that our voice is heard and enabling everyone to be that change agent, to speak positively out in the world about what we’re doing. What’s changing is the way we’re working, because we need to focus more on our clients and work, and less on internal strategies and initiatives. Because we have so many creative people, often they’re asking, “What can we do to improve our ideas? What can we do to improve ourselves internally?” We’re shifting that mindset to focus more externally on how we can put those efforts towards our clients.

How are principles of quality and excellence shaping your business?

We’re focusing on leadership objectives and internal value. We’re building out clear job descriptions and role expectations for individuals, as well as building manager capability. We want to have great managers who can facilitate the growth and development of our people.  That means looking at our internal systems like performance management, and building inclusivity in all of those systems. Our leadership objectives have to include inclusive behaviours, because that diversity of mindsets and opinions is going to be what drives us forwards and creates the best work.

What’s working best for you?

Our ‘magic sauce’ is optimism. When you see someone speaking out in a positive way, or delivering a success story from a client, that’ll boost morale. We do a lot of internal sharing on things that we’re doing well, and things that we’re not doing so well, with confidence and passion. That’s great for the team.

What could you be doing better as a people-focussed professional?

Being honest about the challenges we face is hard, because it is a really difficult role. I’m really passionate about being vulnerable and setting boundaries, because burnout and mental health is real. We’re an always-on culture that has Slacks and emails going on all night because it’s a global business, so it’s hard to switch off. It’s really important for us to model good behaviour around boundary setting. That’s definitely something that I am still learning to do. Something that I think would help is seeing my leaders setting boundaries and managing these challenges publicly too, because it’s always difficult to be the first one to do it.

What does being vulnerable mean to you?

It’s just being honest about how you’re really doing. You never know what someone is going through, and it’s hard when you’re interacting with so many people on a daily basis to have that many meaningful conversations about how they are. Being vulnerable means connecting as humans. It’s definitely a challenge, because it can be a drain. I understand that, and I’m working on it as well, because it can create such a big change in your company culture. Vulnerability is essential for individuals and working relationships because it helps people not to feel so alone.

To find out more about managing through mindsets and leading through vulnerability, tune into The Disruptive Mindset Podcast on Spotify here and Apple Podcast here.

On Episode 7 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we spoke to Shuchita Shukla about automating talent acquisition. Shuchita is the head of talent within GlobalLogic, the company on a mission to create sustainable and responsible digital products. With almost a decade of experience, Shuchita has sourced talent on a global level, from recent graduates to senior executives. She told us about her experiences and how we can implement automation into our recruitment practices.  

You’ve been working on an automation project, could you tell us about that? 

There is not enough digital talent. Organisations like us have to figure out where to find talent, or find a way to make it for ourselves. We’ve been running a project that aims to build our own digital talent. We are in the beta phase already, where we hire people with the base skills and then train them onto digital technologies. Alongside that we’re doing a lot of upskilling and training on digital platforms.  

Automation comes in around the entire talent acquisition landscape, from attraction to onboarding. Recruiters are doing multiple manual steps; attracting, resourcing, screening, running reassessments and getting feedback. Connecting with candidates to the point that they stay connected and interested in joining your network takes time. Our automation landscape reduces the time we spend on processes. The system takes over doing the mundane things so that our people can do more complex tasks, like more one-on-one conversations where they act as career coaches and counsellors and support these candidates through their journey. It has helped us think with more agility and made us more scalable. 

Would you say it’s been a success? 

What we are seeing already is that the conversations have become more educated. Because the candidates are going through online assessments or doing training online, there is scientific information about the candidates credibility. It’s been a very difficult and interesting journey at the same time, because convincing recruiters to use automation hasn’t been easy.  

What advice would you give to someone else trying to automate their recruitment process? 

What we are doing is the future of getting the best-in-class talent. At the same time, we need to make the current systems ready for it. Change management, ensuring that people see value in the process and getting everybody on board is important. Not everybody will be, but that’s when you find your ambassadors and run pilots. That gives you success stories that everybody can latch on to. That’s been our biggest lesson so far.  

To hear more about what Shuchita and her team at GlobalLogic are doing, tune into the full episode of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast on Spotify here and Apple Podcast here. 

On Episode 6 of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we sat down with Jayde Tipper, the CPO at Temenos, to talk about all things HR. Jayde’s career has people at the heart of it, so her insights into the industry are based on a close relationship with the people on the front lines. We asked her where the industry is headed and how we can help it get there.  

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned in the HR and recruitment space? 

Don’t always hang around with the HR people. Spend time with the business people, go for coffee, seek them out and be curious about the business. Ask them ‘What does this mean? Why do we measure this? Why is this important? Why do we care so much about software?  Can you invite me to that meeting?’ You’ll pick stuff up from your HR colleagues anyway, but you need to understand the business in order to be relevant. I’ve never had a business leader say, ‘Why are you asking me this stuff?’ because people love talking about what they know and what’s important to them. People will be excited about those relationships, because they don’t get them often.  

Having that level of curiosity and learning agility is a real differentiator in our industry. It’s good to be interested in whatever you’re working on. Whether you’re in financial technology, software or selling tins of beans, you’ve got to find some interest in it or you’ll be inauthentic. Putting yourself in uncomfortable situations where you know nothing and learning from them will get you a long way. 

How do you think recruitment is evolving? 

There’s a couple of fundamental principles that will change based on supply and demand. We keep hearing about the war for talent, but that’s just the norm now. When you have such a disconnect between supply and demand, organisations cannot hire their way out of the problem. You cannot hire what doesn’t exist. Because of this ongoing supply and demand component, employees have all the power.  

Organisations will have to be much more open to different types of hiring moving forwards. Permanent hiring will be massively reduced because people will be much more contract led, and there’ll be much more of this gig economy. Different generations of candidates are also asking for different things. Young people coming into the workplace are asking about social impact, they aren’t asking ‘What’s my sick leave? Am I gonna get access to Virgin Active?’ Organisations need to rethink what it means to hire. You’re not filling jobs, you’re solving business problems. We don’t write job descriptions any more, we write problem statements. Our job is to identify the problem that we need someone to solve and the skills that will enable them to solve that problem and advertising that. 

An example from FinTech is bringing in customer experience professionals. We were looking for people from banks who understood customer experience within the industry, but banks give the worst customer experience ever, so why were we doing that? Why didn’t we look at McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Hilton Hotels? We needed people who provided an excellent user experience to come into our sector to disrupt it. That’s why we exist as a company; to revolutionise the industry. Companies need to be much bolder in bringing people in from other industries, because that’s the future. 

What do you see the future of recruitment looking like? 

Recruitment hasn’t changed in 20 years. We’re not doing any of the same things we were doing 10 years ago in most parts of the business, but we’re still calling candidates and asking them, ‘Why do you want this job?’ Why don’t we have AI and systems and tools to change the way we work? We’re not using little black books anymore, but with the candidates, has it really changed? The future will come by us figuring out how it could be and then working back from there. How is this gonna look when my kids are in HR? We need to embrace all of the new technology and find a better way of engaging candidates.  

To hear more about the future of recruitment, tune into the full episode of The Disruptive Mindset Podcast on Spotify here and Apple Podcast here. 

Here at Disruptive Hiring we love learning from the people in our community. On The Disruptive Mindset Podcast we recently had the opportunity to sit down with Silvia Mensdorff-Pouilly, who is the SVP of Banking & Payments in Europe at FIS, and an Advisory Board Member at The Payments Association. With such an impressive background we were keen to talk to her about the Digital Payments sector. She told us all about the impact that payments have on financial health and wellbeing, from a personal level to a global scale. One of the highlights of the conversations was her insights on the importance of financial literacy. Read on to learn more! 

What is the social impact of currency? 

There are a lot of cultural differences in the way that people think about money. To me, money is such an interesting concept. Yuval Harare, who’s a beautiful anthropologist and writer, Israelian writer, he wrote a book called Sapiens: A Short History of Humankind, and he talks about the concept of money because we invented money to trade. He says that for 1000s of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets of peace, merged money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as, it’s not money that is the root of all evil, it’s the love of money. Money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open minded than language, state law, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation etc. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know or trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively. 

How can understanding money change lives?  

Now, the important thing is to help people understand how money works. I’m very passionate about financial education and financial inclusion. Financial inclusion starts with helping people understand how money works. When you think about the education system, it doesn’t do that. My children, for example, get a lot of economics at school, but they are taught about macroeconomics and so forth, not how to balance the household books. In the past, we would teach girls how to balance the house books, but now we’re not teaching anybody how to do that. Kids aren’t learning how to earn money, save money, spend money or invest money. When you educate somebody about money, you give them a lot of freedom because you’re giving them the ability to create their own wealth. Ultimately, somebody that is financially included and understands how money works is going to be able to break some of the cycles of poverty that we have. 

What are the dangers of digitising our finances? 

In a digital world, managing money becomes easier to some extent, but it becomes more difficult in others. I think cash is dangerous, so I spent all my life digitalising money. When you’re a little kid, you get five pounds and you go and get an ice cream, then they hand you the ice cream and you get a couple of coins back. I remember my little girl thinking, ‘I got more money back and an ice cream’, because she didn’t understand the value of cash. We are still very physical beings, so that physical exchange is super important in helping us understand value. In a digital world it is much harder for people to understand, particularly for children to understand that you’re still losing something when you tap your card. With financial digitisation there’s an even bigger need to educate people on financial health and how to manage their money in a digital environment. We really need to manage the disadvantage that comes with it, which is that you could leave people behind because they’re just not digitally savvy.  

To learn more about the digital payments sector tune into The Disruptive Mindset Podcast and listen to the full conversation on Spotify here and Apple Podcast here.