FinTech West - Women in FinTech 6/3/20
On Friday 6th March FinTech West celebrated International Women’s Day a couple of days early with a Women In FinTech event hosted at DAC Beachcroft in Bristol.
With a stellar line up of speakers drawn from the region’s FinTech community and further afield, we were delighted to have over 100 people registered for the event.
Stuart Harrison, of Whitecap Consulting and FinTech West, opened proceedings and gave a short introduction, welcoming the audience to FinTech West’s seventh event since the start of 2019, each of which has been held at a different venue. This was the first event to be held since the publication of Whitecap’s recent research into the Bristol & Bath FinTech ecosystem, which has been well received across the region.
DAC Beachcroft - Helen Faulkner
Helen Faulkner, Global Head of Insurance at hosts DAC Beachcroft and recently named in The Lawyer Hot 100, welcomed the attendees and explained that DAC Beachcroft acts for 19 of the top 20 insurers in the UK, as well as an impressive roll call of financial services and FinTech brands. Helen walked the audience through her career journey to date, which has enabled her to reach senior roles within the business while also raising 3 children – thanks to the flexibility and support offered by DAC Beachcroft.
Innovate Finance – Ali Griffiths
Our first guest speaker was Ali Griffiths, Director of Strategy at Innovate Finance, the representative body for UK FinTech. Innovate Finance is a membership organisation and has been increasingly active in its engagement with regional FinTech ecosystems over the last year, including forming the FinTech National Network, which includes FinTech West amongst its members. Innovate finance hosts IFGS, the annual showpiece event of UK FinTech, which takes place in London on 20-22nd April. Ali highlighted Innovate Finance’s work on diversity and inclusion, citing that only 3% of FinTech investment goes to female founders. This week Innovate Finance announced the ‘Standout 35’ from its Women In FinTech Powerlist, which included one of our other speakers, Georgia Stewart of Bristol-based Tumelo.
LOQBOX – Jenny Hall
Jenny provided an interesting and amusing view of where she wanted to be at 90. And followed that up with her personal, and stunning story of how she ended up taking a break to go around the world yachting – having never done it before and starting by Googling how! Now she is Chief Marketing Officer for the fast growing FinTech LOQBOX.
Jenny explained how LOQBOX helps people get access to the financial system. Almost 2 billion people across the globe are invisible to the financial system, including 5.8m in the UK. People are excluded from the best deals due to lack of opportunity (credit history), lack of financial education, and lack of resilience (savings or access to funds).
Tumelo – Georgia Stewart
Georgia arrived to a round of applause for getting selected for the Women In FinTech Powerlist and as one of the ‘Standout 35 Stars no less. Continuing the theme of telling the personal journey, Georgia explained how her arrival in FinTech was driven by wanting to make a positive impact on key issues such as gender and climate change after originally campaigning while at Cambridge University to get them to change their investment strategy.
Georgia explained how Tumelo is tackling the lack of transparency in the investment industry, particularly in the pensions space. Tumelo enables pension members and retail investors to identify all the underlying companies in their funds and other investments, enabling any investor to influence change at the companies they own with their shareholder vote. Tumelo provides APIs and a dashboard to investment platforms and pension providers to help them engage their underlying clients.
Curve – Katie Butterfield
Curve is one of the best known brands in FinTech in the UK, enabling customers to carry all their cards via a single card – the Curve card. Launched in 2016, over £500m has been spend on Curve to date. Katie explained how in 2019, Curve raised £6m in just five hours, a Crowdcube record but it was so quick even some employees didn’t have time to take part! Besides what Curve does now, Katie touched on some of the exciting developments within Curve to take it beyond banking.
Katie told the audience that 60% of Curve’s Bristol management team is female and how Curve has taken part in a number of gender driven initiatives including a series of Wo(men) in Tech Standups and a Girls FinTech Insight programme, which focuses on girls under the age of 18.
Donna Bradshaw
Donna is an experienced financial services commentator. Reflecting on the current environment of low interest rates and quantitative easing, Donna likened this to “pumping air into a flat tyre”.
Donna shared some startling stats with the audience, including:
· There are only 6 female CEOs in FTSE 100 companies.
· 98% of venture capital funding goes to men.
· Just 3% of venture money is spent on all female teams, 8% percent given to mixed teams and 89% supported all male teams.
· In the UK, just 1p in every £1 invested in 2017 went to all-female founder teams.
· 83% of VC deals involved founding teams with no women.
· According to an FCA report, the “upper echelons of many financial services businesses remain as non-diverse today as back in 2005.”
Donna also used the event to announce her own business plans to create a diversity focused platform called Valued which we are all interested to hear more about as it develops.
ADLIB – Alex Cosgrove
ADLIB is a well known Bristol-based recruitment firm with a core strength in technology and data. Alex has been recruiting in the Data, Insight & Analytics space for the past 10 years across the South of England. In 2017, he joined ADLIB as a Principal Consultant to set up a desk for Data, Insight & Analytics to support companies moving to become data driven and those that want to adopt AI & Machine Learning.
Alex discussed topics relating to the recruitment process including engagement, conducting interviews, and creating an inclusive workplace. He highlighted the need to create more diverse tech teams and bring in more people to the sector which ADLIB is helping through its support of the Tech Talent Academy.
Panel discussion
After the presentations, all the speakers took part in a panel discussion. The session was chaired by Stuart Harrison and the speakers took questions from the floor.
After such an inspirational set of speakers sharing their personal and business journeys, many questions naturally centred around what can be done to address the current inequality both in financial services and technology. It was clear that everyone wants to help solve this issue, and there’s a passion for doing so. The discussions on how no doubt will continue and hopefully plans shall begin to take shape.
Next event
The next FinTech West event will take place on 1st May. The venue has yet to be confirmed. Sign up here.