92: Building an inclusive fintech organisation: Karoline Raets, and Laurent Jacquemin

The Elephant in the Room

Shownotes:

Everybody wants to talk about fintech - apparently it is the new normal. I recently learnt that a staggering 95% of the founders of the FinTech 50 list are male. Not difficult to do the math here - it means women founders make an abysmal 5%.

An International Monetary Fund Report from Dec 2022 - Digital Gender Gap, says that women represent less than 13 percent of leadership - both as founders and members of executive boards of fintech firms. Women’s representation in fintech is worse than traditional banking and technology companies.

And then there is the issue of gender inequality in fintech’s user base……… reports suggest that the needs of women customers is hugely underserved, the lost opportunity means 100s of billions of dollars in foregone revenue each year.

To discuss the above and a myriad of issues (related to gender equity) facing the fintech sector I spoke with the leadership team from Adenza, a global fintech company with presence in over 20 countries. My guests for this episode of the podcast were Karoline Raets, and Laurent Jacquemin. The timing was just right with IWD 2023 around the corner…….We spoke about 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 Internal and external imperatives that are driving the industry to be more inclusive and representative

👉🏾 Adenza’s vision on gender diversity and equity. How is the vision aligned with Adenza’s purpose; launch of Adenza’s women’s resource group

👉🏾 Poor gender diversity in the fintech industry, challenges in being able to attract and retain female talent. Addressing the ‘war for talent’

👉🏾 Systemic gender biases in the workplace; representation statistics and ambition

👉🏾 Absence of role models, and the cascading impact on pipeline for managerial and leadership positions

👉🏾 The role of internal sponsors in supporting women to achieve their potential; Laurent’s experience as an executive sponsor

We also spoke about inclusive leadership, monitoring progress and both Karoline Raets and Laurent Jacquemin shared some great advise for women wishing to pursue a career in fintech.

My takeaway from the conversation - there is lots to be done but the industry can change the status quo with the right intent, and taking specific actions (linked to strategic long terms goals).

To learn more listen here 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

#fintech #womeninleadership #genderequity #representationmatters #equityandinclusion #inclusivefintech

Shownotes

Memorable Passages from the Podcast

Karoline: Thank you, Sudha, it is great to be here.

Laurent: Hello Sudha yeah, I'm very excited about what we're going to do.

Karoline: I will start. So I am Karoline, I'm from Belgium origin, and I lived and worked in Belgium, France, and I'm now based in the UK. I've been working since I was 21, I won't say what age I am today. You can go and figure that out.

Karoline: But I've worked in various roles in sales, marketing, communications and then I ended up in the HR world in 2007. I must say that most of the time I have worked in international organisations, so I've been very exposed to different cultures, different ways of working. And it's been almost 25 years now that I've been working in the FinTech industry.

Karoline: I'm married to a jazz musician, so a totally different world, which is actually great. And I have two daughters, one is 16 and the other one is 13 and I'm the Chief People Officer at Adenza since 2020. .

Laurent: Sure. So my name is Laurent. I am French, as I think you would tell from the accent. I'm not going to tell you my age either, but I'll tell you the age of my children, and you will see that I'm a bit older than Karo, they're more in between 20 and 30 my children.

So I'm French, as I said, I'm sharing the life of a French ceramic artist, which is a bit different to what I do, which is a great too. We are the father and mother of three plus two, if you see what I mean, and we try and see them often to compensate for a bit of an empty nest these days.

Laurent: I'm in the FinTech space since the nineties, actually, did all the way up from a 30 ish staff french software company to about 50,000 people, a US giant FinTech before landing at Calypso, that was about 4.5 years ago. And loving it, to be honest with you. I look after the customer facing practices of Adenza, customer support, customer delivery, customer success, and cloud services. And like Karoline, I've been exposed to a great number of different cultures and nationalities throughout my career and I have to say I love it. .

Karoline: I can go first. Women first, right. Yeah. So I believe that Adenza's vision on gender diversity and equity is pretty simple.

Karoline: It's really about respecting each and every individual in the organisation for who they are and make sure that we allow each and everyone to just be themselves. I think that if you achieve that diversity and equity balance, generally people feel that they belong in the organisation. So this is something that we strive towards, is to make sure that people have this sense of belonging.

Karoline: So that's what I would say, is how I see the diversity and equity at Adenza.

Laurent: Yeah, I think we're very close on that Karoline actually, because I think that our vision is to be simply diverse and equitable, as simple as that. It is to make sure that there is no impediment to anybody's career due to gender, ethnicity, religion, whatever.

Laurent: We are a truly global business with presence in, I think more than 25 countries these days, on the five continents. We've got local employees in each and every of our offices, and given we are a software and services business, there is no genuine reason whatsoever for all of the roles to not be open to everybody, actually, irrespective of gender, ethnicity and everything, so I guess it's our vision.

Laurent: And to your question, Sudha as to whether it's a tick box exercise or not? We're not the kind of people who just tick boxes, I mean we don't know each other very well, but everybody in Adenza will tell you we're not looking to just tick boxes, we're really looking for action.

Laurent: Sure. Maybe I'll start on this one then. I think that the imperative is both internal and external, actually pretty simple. Internal as I said, because again, there is no reason why any kind of role in a business like Adenza should be restricted in access based on gender, on age, on ethnicity, on religion. To be honest with you, the only criteria that we tend to recognise in terms of selection criteria are skills and experience and ability to excel in the role, that's about it. So that's kind of the internal imperative, people are looking for that you said it Sudha, that's absolutely true. And externally, the point is that we see a real shift towards ESG, including for our customers who are being regulated on that topic or start to be regulated on that topic.

Laurent: And they start to raise expectation with company like us on those topics, which is why, together with the kind of internal push, we're looking at that more seriously these days.

Karoline: Well yeah, I totally aligned with what Laurent just said, and I think it's all about creating that environment where there's no judgment, where ideas are welcomed and listened to. It's being open-minded and having in mind that people have different perspectives.

Karoline: And so I think to be really inclusive, everyone in the organisation should keep that in mind on a daily basis as they work with others in the organisation. Because ultimately, if we all do that, it will drive into a higher engagement which usually, it drives that sense of belonging, which again ties it back to, being an inclusive environment.

Karoline: So it's a mindset. And I think that at Adenza we're in a place right now where people understand that and we continue to build on that to make sure that we continue to reinforce that awareness with our staff at all levels in your organisation.

Karoline: All right. I think I would like to start here, Laurent. So if we look at the gender split today, cuz I mean diversity and equity goes way beyond just men and women. But if we just take that gender split, male-female in the organisation at Adenza, today we've got 31%. Female, 69% male and if you look at the FinTech industry in general, as you mentioned, Sudha, it's highly underrepresented by women. It's a real male environment, if I may say. So in general, less than 30% are females in the FinTech industry.

Karoline: Now this can be due to various reasons, one is that there are less applicants in the FinTech industry as a starting point on the hiring side. But it is also due to a historic sort of more senior leadership teams that are male and if you look at the FinTech industry and the senior roles, they're 17% are filled by women.

So actually, if you look at Adenza, we're at 31% overall, and we have 27% of our women that are in senior leadership or management positions. So we're actually better than what the industry is doing. And if you take it a step further in the FinTech industry, and I looked at this survey a couple of days ago.

Karoline: The founders of the FinTech 50 listing are 95% male and 5% female. And another information that I found in one of the surveys was that most of the FinTech apps that you would find are used by men. So there really is a lower interest or maybe eagerness to work in this industry because it has been for a very, very long time managed by men.

So if I look now at Adenza and our leadership, so like I said, we've got two executives on our leadership team, so that represents 20%. So we're, again, slightly above the benchmark if you look at the FinTech and 27% female. So, my view is that going forward, I would really like to see that shift increase so that we could get to, let's say a 35%, 65%.

Karoline: And if we could achieve that by the end of the year, that would be great. But I also don't want to force that, because we want people, like Laurent said earlier, the people who join us and who work at Adenza, we want them to have the right skills, the right experience, the passion and drive. And if that is men or women, it doesn't really matter. But if we could get more women with those attributes, then we'd be very happy to take 'em on board.

Laurent: Yeah. So I mean, it's interesting to see that we've got those percentages added and that are a bit better than the industry and that's good, that's good to know. I don't think that we are going to be happy with that Karoline, are we? We want do better job then for sure.

Karoline: We always wanna do better.

Laurent: Exactly. And the reason why we decided to launch that and allocate kind of sponsors and really start to look at it very, very seriously is precisely because we want to beat the benchmark.

Laurent: We're not the kind of people who love to just be at the benchmark, so that being said, I do remember if we want to share some sort of an anecdote at Adenza. I did consider, I think it was like 24 months ago already, I did consider to make it mandatory to create short list of candidates that would've at least one female candidate in it.

Laurent: Started to work on that with the talent acquisition team and the net kind of result we got at the time was that we faced a difficulty, cause at best following that rule would make the time to create the short list longer, because of a lack of female applicants and sometimes actually we were not able in a reasonable period of time to find women applicants in those short lists.

Laurent: And we had to break our own rule a few times just for the sake of the business, cause we can't wait like years before we find someone. So, I think it tells a lot about the fact that indeed, that industry today does not have as many women who are applicants potentially to all the jobs that we've got to offer, and that tells a large part of the story, I guess.

Karoline: Okay. So I can start here. I wouldn't say apart from what Laurent just mentioned, us wanting to try to get like a short list of female candidate for each of our jobs, we haven't necessarily done like specific work or efforts to attract more women to the organisation.

Karoline: So our genuine approach is that we're open to all applicants. But what I can say is that, and what I've heard also from women at Adenza is that we're not afraid to hire a young mom who just had twins. We're not afraid to hire a single mom. We're totally open to hire people from various backgrounds religions, as long as, again, it ties back to them having the experience and the skills and the passion and the drive.

Karoline: But recently we have now constituted an internal employee group, ‘Women at Adenza’. And so one of the things that we will put on the table with that group, which constitutes over a hundred women willing to help us with moving this project forward, is to also get their input on, what should we be doing to attract more women to the organisation? What do they feel is important, what would make a difference or an impact? And I think it is more about, rather than a couple of heads at the top of the organisation trying to figure this out, is to get the bottom up. And also to rely on that internal network, to spread the word externally because all these women are also connected to other women. So this just opens up the network much, much broader.

Laurent: Yeah, I guess that when I think about that, it seems to me like we're trying to bridge the inflection point between not actively resisting in any shape or form to having women at Adenza to dealing with the passive biases. So since I joined the organisation, I don't recall having any difficulty to attract women to Adenza, i.e anytime my guys would've interviewed with candidates, with female candidates there is nothing in Adenza that would prevent those women to join Adenza. I've never heard about any kind of active bias of people going like, no, I'm not interested by that kind of person, that kind of gender, that kind of age and all that, I've never seen. Now it's great news, I guess, that we have no kind of active bias from that perspective.

Laurent: But the reality is that we've got passive biases. And the only example I would give going back to the anecdote I shared with you a bit earlier today, is that you could look at people accepting to have a shortlist, which is made of exclusively male candidates as a passive bias. And I guess that we're at that inflection point today where we go like, well, maybe we should not accept that and we should do something about that. And that's, I think, where we are at today.

Karoline: Yeah, I mean, they're definitely going to give their inputs. So we've had two or three meetings so far and there's plenty of ideas and anecdotes. But I think that at Adenza, we of course have like any organisation, our code of ethics, our internal policies. So what we want to do is make sure that we create that environment that fosters, a safe environment for people, where mental health is taken into account as well.

We ensure that we create that awareness and what we did in 2022 is we started to roll out webinars around emotional intelligence for managers, but also for employees. We were rolling out on March 14th which is going to be Women's Month at Adenza, we're doing a dedicated webinar towards unconscious bias. and we'll kick it off on the 14th of March. But again, this is something that we will be rolling out on a regular basis because we do have 2000 people in the organisation. So, for the word to spread you got to repeat and repeat. So I think it is about reiterating with our people and augmenting that sense of awareness.

Karoline: And then just being vigilant as well, that when we hear something or see something is, not to pretend it didn't happen or to think, oh, you know, it's okay, was this once it'll go away. Because it may be a pattern and you don't want to sit on that and do nothing. But the big piece in my view comes with creating that awareness so that people have it on their minds.

Laurent: Well, not much to add because that was a pretty comprehensive answer. No, I think again, that I've never since I joined the company seen any kind of active bias in any direction. So I don't know whether it happened or not, but I've never seen that. And I've met with a number of people that have been in a number of meetings, so that kind of has some value from that perspective.

Laurent: But really where we're today is to go one step further and start educating people and ourselves. Right? In terms of how do you reckon, how do you identify any kind of passive biases and how you deal with that? And while I'm pretty sure that I never saw any kind of active biases again, I couldn't be that certain that I never saw passive biases. So...