 Hi, everyone, and welcome to OSSF New York. My name is Tamara Shea MacKerrim. I'm a lead user experience design consultant at Scott Logic. I'm also a member of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee at Finos, and I co-lead the event and marketing stream in the EMA region. We also have three of the panelists who are actually part of the committee as well here. Today, we've got a panel on women's career progression within FinTech, and I'm very honored to be sitting with four leaders within this field who will be sharing their career journeys with us today. Our goal is to share experiences and learnings and to provide guidance to everyone in this industry and specifically women in their career progression. In terms of the format, I'm going to introduce the panelists and kick off the conversation. You can submit questions throughout the panel on slido.com using the code OSSF. And midway through, we'll stop to take a few questions and then continue the conversation. So let's get started. Here with me today is, left to right, Kim Prado, who's the CIO at Bank of Montreal Capital Market, Alejandra Velagra, who's the global head of city velocity and digital solutions, Jane Gavronsky, who's the chief technology officer at Finos, the Linux Foundation, and Rita Chatterverdi, who's an executive director in the release and change management at Morgan Stanley. Thank you so much for being here today. I want to start the conversation by talking a bit about the challenges that we face throughout our careers and how these evolve throughout the different stages. Kim, you started your career in finance and then made the move to technology, and now you've been working in FinTech for almost 30 years. How have the challenges you faced throughout different stages of your career? When you say 30 years, that really scares me. In case you guys are curious. Very impressive. It doesn't feel like it's been that long. But anyway, it kind of has. No, you're right. I started my career in the business. I was a mortgage-backed securities trader and CMO structure, and I sold treasuries and agencies, and then became a quant. And from there, I ended up in technology. And it was a complete accident, to be honest. I didn't even know it was happening. And the key here, for me at least, was when you think about technology and how it's evolved with my career alongside of it, we didn't have BAs. We didn't have QA and all these things, all these roles that go around development today. And we had to do everything ourselves. And I mean, I'd be sitting on the desk just building a tool and deploying it to the traders, and they would trade off of it. It wasn't this big hoopla of all these functions. And so it was really a, when I first started, it was all about build and building solutions quick, fast, get them out the door so we can make money. Then it turned into a buy situation where we weren't building as much anymore. Now there was vendors that were popping up for everything on the planet, and we were buying more software and integrating. And then you have open source, which came into my life. And so the way I like to look at it now is we've got build, we've got buy, and we've got open source. And when I think about our strategy and where we're heading with all of this, it's not one way, right? It's a lot of different players at all times to deliver a solution. But I've been very fortunate over the years to get to see the evolution, especially in the e-trading space. I mean, I don't know about anyone else in the audience that's been in the e-trading space, but to watch the progression of fixed income e-trading, especially, it's like revolutionary what's happened there. And that's another example of like, okay, let's build a pricing model and a spreadsheet and push it out to trade web so we can go live in 1997 or 98, whatever year it was. And now it's like, nobody even sees a ticket, right? So. And I guess, so there's an element as you're doing all that of leading different people and supporting them throughout. Kind of when you started your career, was it more kind of doing all of that work, being more hands-on and kind of transitioning to kind of provide that support to others to succeed in doing that as well? Yeah, very hands-on. I've had a sweat to the oldies every step of the way to get to where I am, yeah. And I guess in terms of career progression, as you progress in your career and manage more people, communication becomes crucial to success. But sometimes we may face certain challenges in terms of being heard. Have you faced a situation where you felt that either your ideas were ignored or undermined and how did you approach that? All day long, right? I mean, how many times are you sitting in a meeting and you have a great idea and the guy next to you doesn't wanna stop talking so you just never comes out or you finally get your turn to say what you're thinking and it doesn't come out right, right? And you just, they just roll their eyes, right? But you have to be tough, you have to be strong and you have to remember that you earned your seat there and your opinion does matter. And just because someone says, oh, that's not a good idea or you shouldn't do that, it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It means, okay, you've gotta go back to that person, you've gotta explain your point, you gotta hold your ground and you've gotta actually bring them along with you versus fighting or getting upset. Because, you know, everybody's got a different opinion and that's what makes the world so wonderful, right? We're all different. So, and I guess, you know, the challenges we face may change throughout their career but we also, as people, mature and become more confident in challenging the status quo and, you know, doing what feels authentic to us. Ali, you've been working at Citi for over 20 years as well. Now, how has your approach to overcoming challenges evolved? Well, it's definitely evolved. I think my approach to overcoming challenges when I first started in the industry was to, you know, weep every Sunday night because I had to go to work on Monday morning. So, I believe we've evolved past that. No, you know, I think a story that kind of illustrates the point well for me, I also grew up in the mortgage backed securities industry and on the trading desk at Citi and I noticed when I was probably like an associate VP that pretty much everybody just on Fridays would go golfing. You know, they all just like got up and left to golf and I was there because I didn't know how to golf. Yeah, my dad's South American like got like golf. No, you know, football, soccer, like yes. Totally foreign to me and I was getting left behind to print everybody's tickets. So, I was like, oh, you guys golf? Well, I make money for you that I don't even see the benefit of in the end and I was like, that's kind of effed up. So, I at one point was like, no, like I'm not doing this anymore. So, I just said that I'd golfed. I was like, yeah, I golf, I'm golfing. And I showed up to golf with clients with a, you know, a pitching wedge, a putter and a seven iron. I don't know, for those of you who golf, maybe I'm getting some nodding in the audience. Like, okay, yeah, that would get you through at least some section of the golf course. And so, you know, I would say that was kind of in the earlier stages of my career, maybe like a moment when I just kind of said enough, I'm different, but I'm not gonna let that difference, you know, sort of be a detriment to my happiness at work. So, I just kind of joined the party. And then maybe a different example and this was a really pivotal point in my career. At this point, I was in the rates business actually. And Freddie Mac, one of the big mortgage agencies was one of the, if not the largest client in the rates market at the time. And the head of the desk was covering them and it was just, it was like not quite working out. And there was a woman who was running their swap book, their duration book. And at some point, someone was like, well, Allie, why don't you just back up the head of the desk and like see if you can make some headway with Freddie. And so, I sort of pinged her, you know, we didn't have sympathy back then. So, we didn't have blue, we didn't have sympathy, so I was picking up Bloomberg, but reached out and was like, you know, why don't, why don't we just get together the two of us? And rather than going out to a steak dinner and having some like heinously expensive bottle of red wine, we ended up getting pedicures together. I know there's a lot of guys in the room, but I'll blame, and maybe you've all had pedicures, but it is really fantastic. And so, she and I, you know, the head of duration trading at Freddie Mac and, you know, May, the two of us sat down, like chatted with one another, really ended up building a relationship over the long run. But I think that was a moment where I used who I am in a sort of a more genuine way to connect with a really important client. And I think she really appreciated it too, because she didn't wanna go any more steak dinners either. And so, I think that we can, you know, to take it beyond my personal experiences, I think that we all connect more effectively when we are true to who we are. Even when that seems like something that might be going a little bit against the grain, what I think the most important piece is just having that genuine connection with whether it's your colleagues or your clients or, you know, whomever it is you're interacting with. I think this is really, I love that idea. I'm getting the bad, I think. Pedicures for everyone. So, this is great. You know, whether it's being the only person that doesn't golf or the only woman in the room, you know, some of the challenges we face in our career stem from being the odd one out. I wanna ask you, Jane here, have you been in a situation where you felt that you're the odd one out, and how do you think our differences can be used to our advantage? Yes, but to be honest, oftentimes, sometimes, oftentimes I would be reminded by someone else that I was the odd one out because I was just too oblivious to notice. I don't know, I was just like so scared and sometimes scared, sometimes nervous about making the right impression, sometimes nervous about doing a good job, that I didn't really think about that I was the only woman in the room, which oftentimes I was. And sometimes other people would say, oh, there was a lot of, you know, bup, bup, bup, men. And I'd be like, oh, right, okay. But I, just speaking of kind of speaking up and having courage, I think I almost had more courage, funny enough, in the very beginning of my career. I was just, I just recalled recently a story where I literally was right out of the training program and my boss convened a group and there were people there with like 20 years of experience and there it was straight out of college and I thought he said something that was technically very silly. And I just spoke up and I said, well, I don't know anything about anything but I can tell you that that's wrong. And then this other guy who was in the room with me who then became one of my best friends, he came up to me afterwards and he said, wow, I can't believe he did that. And that got me more scared than having blurted that out because I had no reference point that that was not good. And then I kind of started getting more nervous about how do you say things and then you were like, oh wait, did that go over well? So I would say my advice is just just blurt it out and you'd be shocked at how many people do that and they don't think about whether it's right or wrong and it turns out to be probably more right than wrong most of the time, so don't be afraid. But the other speaking of being the odd one out, I would say that to your point, it's kind of almost finding the commonalities between not thinking about necessarily the difference but finding something in common. And for me, for example, I love to cook. So everybody loves to eat at the very least but we may come from different cultural backgrounds and one likes this food and the other one likes that food but we both like to cook or eat so you can probably find a food in common or you like pedicures and that's in common. And sometimes you could bridge the differences or you can explore your differences by first finding something in common and it's like oh, tell me more about this cuisine that I know nothing about. Or so I would say sometimes you kind of have to look for the positive to bridge what seems to be polarizing. And it could be, I guess, something on a personal level like with that person or potentially open source as an example, it could be something that brings people together and they can connect on that as well. It's just like banks, they were polarized and now they can work together on something. So that's great. So we can use our differences to our advantage and find our own approach to overcome challenges but very often we don't actually have to do that alone and we can rely on the support of people around us. And here I wanna ask you, Rita, what role does our professional and personal network or even our family play in facilitating our career progression? So I migrated from India to the US about 19 years back, actually. Came to a new country and I'd done MBA finance in India and I had started to work with GE capital in India but after coming here I didn't find any good opportunities in the field of finance which I always wanted to be in. So I decided to change course, I did some training. So speaking of personal support, my husband was a big support at the time to stand behind me and encourage me and provide me financial support to get reeducated, re-skilled and start over in IT. I read this Sheryl Sandberg book a while back, Lean In, and she says one of the most important decisions a woman will ever make is who she gets married to. So that's really, really important. In terms of professional network and support, in the initial few years, you're just trying to get a sense of who you are, what you like, what kind of people you like to be around and how networking and building relationships is often not at anybody's mind. So once I got at Morgan Stanley and I started to get my footing in those years, I was expecting a promotion. So I was having a conversation with my manager on a regular basis about career progression and promotion. The year I was expecting to be put in the process, he told me I wasn't put in the process and the reason he gave me was that I did not have strong sponsors behind me. So I had a good work delivery, et cetera, but I did not have sponsors who could stand behind me and say, yes, she deserves the promotion. So I sat down with one of my mentors and I said, look, this is the feedback I've got, what do I do now? So that's when she explained to me the importance of networking and building relationships at work. She said that, look, you can do all the work you want, but unless you are marketing that work, unless you're marketing your successes and building relationships with people who can vouch for you behind closed doors where these conversations are happening, because believe it or not, the most important conversations about your career, which is your promotion, your pay, et cetera, you will never be in that room. Somebody else will be speaking for you. So you need those people and that's not gonna happen if you're not gonna build relationships and you're not gonna network with people and build long-lasting relationships with them. So I worked on that since that day and guess what, next year I got promoted, but promotion was not the be and all of it, right? I learned a very important lesson which I would really like for you to take away as well, that building relationships, building a good network, whether it's within your organization or outside, is really important because these are the people you can rely on for advice, as well as for vouching for you, for your promotion and compensation discussions, et cetera. So it's really, really important, plays a big role and we don't often put much value on it, so. Perfect, just to remind everyone, if you want to submit questions, you can submit on slido.com using the code OSSF. If anyone's having technical difficulties accessing that, you can just raise your hands and we can take your question. So I want us to talk a bit here about a particular challenge that we face in our career and that's time management. And this could be in terms of managing time to network and grow professionally, balancing work and life or even taking time for ourselves. And this is a challenge that is not specific to women and anyone can benefit from insight on this. Ali, I want to ask you here, how do you make time to connect with your professional network while still maintaining a healthy work-life balance? Yeah, I wouldn't say that I have achieved a healthy work-life balance, that that is aspirational and it's more like which part of my life is in a state of chaos and catastrophe. One part of my life is always in a state of chaos or catastrophe, despite my best efforts. But I mean, I think what Rita was saying about network is incredibly important. And as much as we're here talking about technology and as much as in my day job, I'm working to in some ways automate people out of processes. The human piece of it ultimately is so critically important to our careers and even our happiness. And I do think it is something that you have to prioritize and you have to actively engage and maintain. And I found sort of back to my earlier point about authenticity. I was never, I'm not a big drinker, like I'll drink from time to time, but as the mortgage folks loved to do, going to a bar after work and it's kind of socializing in a bigger group, I just kind of got quiet and I'm not naturally a very quiet person, but it just wasn't my thing. And as I got, I guess, both a little bit more senior and a little bit older, I just kind of said, you know what, this isn't working for me. I know that this is how a lot of people network, but this scene, like I'm uncomfortable. I'm getting awkward. This is not like my best self coming forward. So I'm not building a network or connection very effectively. And so I started just pinging people for coffee. I mean, I have a couple of city colleagues in the audience and I think they'll know that to be true. I'm much more comfortable in a one-on-one setting where I feel like I'm really giving that person my undivided attention and we're actually connecting. And it also means that I need to take a break and get up from my desk and have a breath of fresh air. Well, I'll just do it with Amit instead of doing it by myself. And that gets me home at a reasonable hour to have time for my husband and my son, which is absolutely critically important to me. And at the same time, I'm building or maintaining my network. And I do it every single day. Every single day I have, I could be walking to get lunch or just getting a cup of coffee, but I'm very, very, very committed to building and maintaining that network. That's perfect. It's almost like building something that just can work around your schedule and the things that you do every day anyway, rather than having to go for drinks after work. It doesn't have to be formulaic. You can do it at an event like this. You can also do it in a way that works for you in a way that fits into your schedule. It's more important that you try to figure out what works for you than that you jam around peg into a square hole because that's what everybody else is doing. Amita, how important has maintaining a work-life balance been for you and also how do you make time to upskill and develop your career? So, and he said it right. It's aspirational. There is no such thing as work-life balance. You keep prioritizing from day to day. What's more important today? And you take care of it. You move on. Next day, something else might be more important. So I do release and change management. And back in the day, we used to have releases, like 12 releases a year. And those releases used to be mammoth releases. We used to prepare for those releases weeks in advance. So leading up to the release, the only focus used to be, or release has to be successful. There shouldn't be any issues, et cetera. Now we have releases every single weekend. There are releases during the week as well. So now it's like, okay, yes, the work has to go on. But at the same time, if things are happening in your personal life and your son has an important game, of course, I have two boys. So of course, you make time for those things. And then when there is a big event in the office or work requires more attention, you then pay attention there. It will again come back to how much personal support you have. My husband and I have been the only ones supporting each other here. He's played a big role in making sure that when I needed to focus on work, I was able to do that. And my team in the office, they allowed me the flexibility to be home when I needed to be home and I needed to be with my family. So creating a strong support system, both in your personal life and your work life is really, really important. I'll just go back to something that Ali was saying about networking as well. A lot of times people think that networking can only happen after work and you go out for drinks, et cetera. But in my own experience as well, just to Ali's point, it's not, I've never networked after work. I have always networked during office hours, during the nine to five, going to people, even to senior management. If you go to anybody and say, hey, I need 15 minutes of your time, I want to just introduce myself and give you some updates about what I've been working on, they'll never say no. And that's a very good way to just approach somebody and let a senior management person know who you are and what you're working on. So just wanted to reiterate that point as well. So I guess there's an element of making time to network and grow professionally. But also, in addition to that, there's something important about making sure that we also avoid burnout. And I want to ask Kim here, how do you make time for yourself? I'm really good at it. I have to say that. I'm good at it. It'll be there tomorrow. If I've learned one thing, the work doesn't get up and walk away. And I have this saying that when I had my second kid, once I realized that the laundry would never be done, I was much happier. I became a happier person. And so I've just learned that sometimes things have to wait. And COVID really threw a hitch in the plan on my schedule. I was very regimented just like these women with nine to five networking and all of that. I don't go out after work either. I like to go home and I'm a big fan of the coffee and the lunches and popping in, but with COVID it made it a little harder, right? Especially with all the back-to-back meetings and now people thinking you can work till eight o'clock at night because you're home or you're home. So one of the things I did is I need fresh air and I would just go for walks and I would bring my iPad with me on the walk and do meetings while I was walking. I mean, there were times when I had the iPad on my treadmill as well, like whatever it took to just have a different set of scenery is what I was going for. I literally had a meeting with a woman who used to work at Barclays in the Short Hills Mall. And I said to her, I'm like, I really want to meet you but I can't do it here and it's like 10 below zero so why don't we meet at Short Hills? And we literally had our meeting walking around Short Hills. But you just do what you gotta do but you gotta make time for yourself. I always joke my free time is from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m. don't mess with it and I mean it. And you gotta pick a time that's for you and not deviate. So committing to keeping that time in the diary but also accepting a level of imperfection and some of that. You gotta, you're not perfect. No one's perfect. If anybody thinks they're perfect, get over it because you're not perfect. You never will be and no software release will ever be perfect. So if anybody expects that too, you know, you just gotta do your best. And as long as you can look yourself in the mirror and know you're doing your best, that's all you can ask of yourself. So I guess time management is difficult for anyone but for women specifically, there's an additional challenge because of societal expectations on women when it comes to family responsibilities. And here I wanna ask you, Jane, do you think that that has changed and what are some of the conversations and the compromises that need to happen to help us overcome these challenges? It has, I think it has changed. I hope it has when I have three children, they're all grown up. When my husband and I got married, or maybe even before, he kind of like at one point we were talking about work and careers and he kind of took, he kind of did this double take and he said, wait, I'm gonna have a career, you're gonna have a job. And I said, no, no, no, no. You're still married today? I said, we have to have a conversation about this. And then we spent probably like four years talking about it. And I said, well, this is how this is, this is what I'd like to do. And we went from that to when, and it just turned out to be, I think I was lucky when my, our first child was born, he had like very busy work life and mine was okay. And I, when I, and at some point, somebody I asked for it and I got a much bigger job and we sat down and we had a conversation. I said, well, you realize I haven't been on any business trips in like 10 years. Literally, I, I was the one who was at home every night at seven PM, no matter what. And he was the one who was trapped. I said, well, this is gonna change now. Are you okay with that? And it was okay because he was in a startup and he had a lot of much more free time. And I started traveling like crazy and he supported me in that. And it just, we got lucky that it happened and he got over the whole career thing. And then other things happened, like my youngest child, she was the third, no one had time for her. She's like the third ball up in the air. Somebody's gotta catch it. And, and I think since she was like six years old, she started making her own play dates, you know? And she would call on the phone and she'd be like, I'm Sasha. I would like a play date with your child. And the mom would be like, because she, we had a schedule. It was all on an Excel spreadsheet. We had a schedule. She knew what nights she was free. And she would, and the mom would be like, wait, can I talk to your mother? To hire her. Yeah, she's still very organized. And she'd be like, no, she's not home. You know, and that's how it got done. And she's loves to tell that story. Things aren't changing though so much. I mean, I've just seen in 20 years, you know, I like to highlight for people like now, my whole team takes parental leave, right? The men take leave, the women take leave, everybody takes leave. And that is creating a certain amount of improved gender equality at home, I think. I think when both parents are like, you know, in the weeds, it definitely helps everyone. Perfect. Just because we're running out of time. Kim, Ali, Jane, and Rita, thank you so much for sharing your journeys with us. I also want to thank everyone on the Diversity and Inclusion Committee at Finos, and especially my colleague, Devon Beckles, who helped me organize this. We have a couple of questions coming in, but the panelists will be available after this to answer questions. So I want to thank everyone for joining us today. Thanks. Please. Thank you.