Tuesday September 8th we (Ohpen) announced the acquisition of Davinci to the outside world which catapulted our company into a different league. Ohpen has now doubled to a team of 350 people strong, offices in 4 countries and 30 nationalities.
On the evening before making this news public, we organized an event “Making History Together” for all colleagues (on location and online) in one of the most unusual event locations in the Netherlands, the Theater Hangaar – home of the longest playing and most successful musical of the Netherlands.
I found it important to address the topic of diversity and inclusion during this evening, especially as we are merging two companies. Two companies with a 10+ and 20+ year history in the financial services and technology industry. Typically not your most diverse and inclusive industries. I was hesitant if I should publish this brief speech, but I believe this topic cannot be addressed enough. So here it goes:
Speech
“I realize that Xiomara and I are the only women on stage tonight. But we are not alone. That’s why you see all our female colleagues behind me (and there is still a lot of work to be done).
About 10 years ago, Ohpen acquired the company I worked at. Ohpen back in the day was a male dominated company where everyone had worked together for over 10 years at BinckBank and they were friends, family even. I was the first ‘newbe’ and the second woman to join.
At first, it was challenging to work with such a tight-knit team. But I was determined to bring in a different perspective and look where we are now. And that was not the first time.
21 years ago, at the age of 21 I moved to the south of Egypt for my first managerial role.
On day 1, one of the men in my team said ‘I do not take orders from women’.
He made a conscious decision to not be inclusive. It shocked me.
But I made an effort to understand. To be inclusive of his point of view. And he did as well, after that first day. When I left Egypt he was one of my most valued colleagues.
Without debating his standpoint or mine, I would like to quote Commander Spock from Star Trek (including a creative add on from yours truly):
“Infinite diversity in infinite combinations, symbolizing the elements that create truth, beauty, creativity and tangible results (1).”
Diversity and inclusion is important for me as a person and in my opinion for the growth of this company.
A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.
It is important to have different perspectives in our company. To truly be a representation of the outside world. To challenge one’s own perspective. To learn, to grow and to exceed expectations. Of each other, of our clients, of their customers. It is all about having the right mentality.
Bringing together 2 companies, with offices in 4 countries and 30 nationalities will take each and every one of us to have an open mind. Bring in your experience, opinions and dare to stand out.
To conclude I would like to share a source of inspiration for me with you, a few of my favorite books. Books on diversity and inclusion not only gender related but also ethnicity, religion, age, high performance teams, winning mentality, cultural backgrounds etc.
Let this day be the starting point from which we are going to write history together. Diverse and inclusive.”
I have to admit that I was a little nervous when the moment came for me to interview the godfather of the Modern Portfolio Theory, Professor Dr. Harry Markowitz. He had been so kind to agree that I would interview him for the book that my colleague Chris Zadeh and I are writing about the psychology behind our irrational behavior when it comes to money matters. A full hour, that is what we had to make sure we could capture some of his insights and convert it into a valuable contribution to our book.
It was not just me in the interview, but also several colleagues. Carla Martinez (who set up the interview) and Sicco Brakema (who introduced us to Dr. Markowitz), shared the same hint of nervousness for this interview. It is not every day that you get to talk to someone with some pretty impressive credentials:
Economist
Recipient of the John van Neumann Theory Prize
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Professor of Finance at the Rady School of Management
Dr. Markowitz must have noticed this as he started by casually talking about a previous trip to the Netherlands and before we knew it several perfectly pronounced Dutch words such as “rijsttafel” came our way which made us a bit more at ease.
Change your perspective
In the movie Mary Poppins Returns which stars Emily Blunt as the title character (which she nails), taking care as a nanny of the new generation Banks children, Meryl Streep plays Mary’s eccentric cousin Topsy “a woman who can fix anything”. When Mary visits her cousin with the Banks children, she realizes that it is the second Wednesday of the month. A day dreaded by Topsy as her world literally turns upside down and she is not able to fix anything.
The legendary Mary Poppins stresses that if you change your perspective everything looks better.
Off course Mary is correct and as the Banks children, Mary and Topsy stand on their head, the world looks much better from that angle. Something that is upside down, is fixed. Turning the second Wednesday of the month into the favourite day for cousin Topsy.
Its all about changing your perspective.
Struggling to change my perspective
During the first 45 minutes of the interview I struggled to ensure that I could convert the experience and knowledge of the brilliant mind of Dr. Markowitz into advice and stories that non-Nobel prize winners could relate to. Giving it my all to keep up with his 91 years of (life) experience and him debating numerous topics he is passionate about:
Critical line algorithm, portfolio theory, sparse matrix methods, simulation language programming (SIMSCRIPT incl. Buddy memory allocation method), capital asset pricing model, etc.
As time was ticking, I dreaded more and more that I would fail to take this unique opportunity and convert it into something that I could use for the book which has a more practical and personal approach combined with a touch of research. My excitement about this interview was slowly turning into fear that I would screw it up by not being able to capture a practical lesson learned or piece of advice from Dr. Markowitz who brilliantly debates the most complicated economic theories and models.
So I was frantically thinking about how I could change my approach to one of the smartest economists in the world so that he would share a piece of advice that would relate to the general public and was in line with the practical direction of our book. Most likely advice that did not originate from one of his theories or research. But I realized during the interview that this is not something he might generally talk about a lot as everybody probably also assumes he talks about his research and really wants to hear the insights from the godfather of Modern Portfolio Theory in real life (as did I).
Then it hit me: I have to change my own perspective. I should not be discussing his achievements as an economist.
Marry Poppins to the rescue.
I was talking to a highly intelligent man and I was trying to get something highly intelligent from this interview. But I realized that I had to adjust my perspective and ask a far more simpler question that did not relate to what he would typically talk about:
“What advice would you give a 12-year old when he or she first received pocket money or money for chores like washing a car of mowing a lawn?
Super simple.
That was it, and I felt the interview turning…Like aunt Topsy Dr. Markowitz turned from sharing brilliant yet very complicated economic explanations, to sharing a deeply personal story with an exceptional piece of advice. A story everyone could relate to and could potentially be inspired by as it did me at that moment. It triggered me, challenged me and make me decide to change certain assumptions I had made for a part of our book, hopefully making it better (I’ll let you be the judge of that when it is published). By changing my perspective, it turned the interview for the better.
Mary Poppins did it again: she came to the rescue and put a smile on my face.
What can the Financial Services Industry and FinTech community learn from Marry Poppins
After this interview, I realised that I should project this experience more on my daily business, the industry I work in and the people around me. I feel that we have to change our perspective more often.
Our industry is rightfully very knowledge based and driven by specialists. Whether you work at a bank, an asset manager, insurance company or at an IT company like I do, we immerse ourselves in jargon, theories, models, technologies and all the great things that come with our industry and experience. All to make things better! #LoveFinTech
But the question is: how do we keep making it better?
Translate brilliance into simplicity
The answer to me is simple: keep changing our perspectives. You and me, not our professional sides but us as consumers and customers. We are all customers. And a customer is only helped if he grasps what we’re talking about and experiences the benefits (make ‘m happy).
My lesson from this unique experience was that when we translate brilliance into simplicity, so all the knowledge, inventions, strategies, theories, jargon we have and change our perspective, we can achieve that what we were looking for. For me it resulted in a valuable piece of information that we can share and hopefully make a difference. So drop the jargon and think benefits if you want to relate to your customer. Not once, but continuously.
Dutch Delights
At the end of the interview Dr. Markowitz and I exchanged our love for Dutch cheeses from the region Gouda and some other typical Dutch treats.
He concluded the interview by sharing a personal experience from many years back when he was in the Netherlands with Dutchman Erik van Dijk with whom he wrote a paper about “Single-period mean-variance analysis in a changing world”. The last name of his co-author translates to dike (which subsequently triggered me to think of Dick van Dyke who stars in both Marry Poppins movies) and the both of them where standing on a dike eating “maatjesharing” (Dutch raw herring), almost nothing is more Dutch than this image.
We concluded the interview with roaring laughter from Dr. Markowitz. Priceless.
Thank you Dr. Markowitz for giving us this opportunity and thank you Mary Poppins for helping me change my perspective.
Leaving Las Vegas…With a mind buzzing and popping like popcorn with enough ideas to fill a roadmap for years to come. That’s the result of going to one of the largest tech conferences in the world organised by cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Las Vegas. But what is it like travelling with techies in one of the largest delegate groups from Europe? Here are 4 lessons learned, my top 5 announced services and some practical tips.
The stats
The event is massive with over 41,000 attendees, 70 new services announced, over 2,000 sessions, 6 massive locations, 3 keynotes, media briefings, analyst summit, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, networking drinks, etc. So come prepared and well rested.
Lessons learned
Ohpen has had delegations go to AWS re:Invent for years but this was my first time and these are my 4 key lessons learned.
Lesson learned 1: Prep like a Pro
The program is huge with over 2,000 sessions scattered across 6 locations. So take your time before travelling to Las Vegas to check all the sessions and their locations and register for the sessions of your choice. Just figuring out which sessions to attend takes time. Invest it!
Lesson learned 2: Divide and conquer
Going with multiple people? Divide and conquer. The venue locations are massive and travelling takes time, especially with the shuttle bus. From one location to another can take up to 50 minutes and that excludes the 10-15 minute walk from the bus to the room. A better option is to stay at one location and have your colleagues cover the other locations (oh, and don’t take the shuttle bus, just get a taxi).
Lesson learned 3: Roadmap reservation (from a business perspective)
As the innovation pace of AWS is accelerating, and you want to stay up to speed with their innovation; we already block time on our development roadmap for technical and functional innovation (approximately 15 – 20%). But I would recommend to block additional time for investigating and implementing the newly announced services from a business perspective (see my top 5 favourite services below).
Lesson learned 4: Not just Tech
Though you have to have a tech heart beating in you somewhere, re:Invent is not just for developers. I can recommend C-Level and (senior) business managers joining in as the importance of technology increases in every industry. Representing your company from a business perspective is important and useful and stimulates getting more tech-focus in the boardroom and on the board agenda.
Diversity
Ok. This is the tricky part of the event. On Day 1 I learned during a diversity session that AWS re:Invent was also being referred to as the “Sausage fest”… and sadly that is still the case. [n.b. Although we have a good representation of women and men at the company, I was also the only woman attending on our behalf]. But there is hope as AWS has dedicated sessions and workstreams to support diversity. The keynote of Werner Vogels actually had more female speakers than male speakers. Creating a more diverse industry is a global challenge for the #tech industry as well as #FinTech and the Financial Services industry in general. It takes a more balanced pipeline in our educational system, more focus of recruiters and senior managers in building their teams. But Rome was not built in a day, so AWS is most definitely putting in the effort as this is what the future should look like. I would love to see some statistics from AWS re:Invent on the development of female versus male attendees over time.
Amazon Web Services announced over 70 new services during the 2017 event and I selected my top 5 from a business perspective:
Sagemaker – fully-managed service that enables developers and data scientists to quickly and easily build, train and deploy machine learning models at any scale. This can open up many possibilities for the Financial Services and #FinTech industries as it makes machine learning more accessible so that we can use data more efficiently to the advantage of customers. Check out this article on “6 Things all non-technical people should know about Machine Learning”.
Transcribe and comprehend – automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing (NLP). The combination would enable developers to add speech to text capability to their applications to analyse audio files and convert it to text files (ASR) and use machine learning to find insights and relationships such as key phrases and topics in text (NLP). Can you imagine what this could do for your client meetings, calls, contact centres, workshops? And AWS takes it a step further as they also offer Translate which is a neural machine translation service that delivers fast and affordable language translation.
Privatelink – private access to Virtual Private Cloud without using public IPs and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the internet. This results in an increase in security and as a result the need for creating traffic plans disappears.
Alexa for Business – Alexa is moving out of the house and into the office! Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels states that “Voice unlocks digital systems for everyone” and Alexa for business enables this. Alexa will simplify conference room booking, calendar synchronisation, control the equipment in your office, notifying facility management and IT about defects, placing order supplies, etc.
Deeplens – a physical device that lets you run deep learning models locally on the camera of the device and take action on what it sees. This was actually one of my first in-depth programming experiences as AWS organised workshops where you could start coding. Our mission: “to hotdog or not” based on the TV show Silicon Valley and the actual viral spoof app Not Hotdog.
Fun (for those that didn’t get the memo that grown-ups don’t play)
As re:Invent requires a relentless pace to keep up with the programme, it’s also about fun. Keep in mind; you are in Vegas, “the worlds largest adult playground”. AWS has incorporated a good number of fun-factors in their program such as the Harley ride, Fitness Bootcamps, Broomball, Tatonka challenge, Lego activities, Pub crawls, DJs and not to forget the final party Re:Play which is a paradise for tech loving people. Or as AWS describes it, an “EDM concert, interactive extravaganza and ultimate playground for those of us who didn’t get the memo that grown-ups don’t play”. Really: I loved it! A massive video game area with old school game machines, a massive ball pit/ inflatable amusement park and slide (mental note: don’t wear leather pants – does not slide well and makes you tumble head first).
Although AWS ensures a full agenda, check the shows in Vegas as well. I can really recommend Ka from Cirque du Soleil and during my visit I went to a Lionel Richie concert. This is a great site to check what’s on: vegas.com
Leaving Las Vegas with a suitcase full of experiences & inspiration
So when Monday morning arrived and it was time to leave Las Vegas, I was buzzing to investigate more, share it with the team and I am already excited about next year. To all Executives and Senior Managers: think about what technology can do for you and consider going to a tech event like AWS re:Invent.
Please allow me to share an internal email that I sent to my team today.
Dear team,
I’m baffled…baffled by the statements of one of the large asset managers in the world, Amundi, after reading an article by Robert Van Egghen in Ignites yesterday where he addresses their response to the European Commission’s consultation on FinTech.
According to the article, Amundi is sounding the alarm on job losses as a result of FinTech (innovation). They are warning against enthusiastically adopting financial technology solutions, saying it could lead to workers losing their jobs, jobs that will require a different skill mix to the jobs being lost. Amundi goes further by commenting about a detrimental effect on jobs which could be bad news for investors if the digital tools do not deliver the promised improvements in operational efficiency.
This mindset is exactly the reason why companies such as Adyen, Transferwise, Betterment, Oscar and our company have been founded. Instead of Amundi embracing these FinTechs, new technology, different skills and innovative mentalities, they are cautioning against it. Feels a little bit like people warning against the dangers of cars when the horse and carriage got replaced, doesn’t it?
They are slightly overlooking the technological developments that are already improving the financial services industry (to be fair – they did refer to some minor benefits):
Introduction of ATMs reducing the burden on high-street banks (a cash machine is just a piece of software)
Online banking reducing the sheer volume of postal mail (and hopefully pretty soon cheques)
Digital and online payment solutions reducing the need for slow money transfers/use of cash/ etc. etc. etc.
No matter how wide the consensus, no matter how fierce the pushback, we have to continually prove that it CAN BE DONE! Thankfully the article also states different opinions such as that of Fiona Frick, CEO of Unigestion. She emphasizes that digital tools are “not there to take their job but to help their job” by “upgrading archaic processes”.
Team. Let’s all pull together in reducing the millions of faxes being sent out every year, the hassle of consumers being bombarded by paper-based, form filling exercises when they just want to access their own money, the millions of cheques being used, et cetera et cetera. And, one day, when we succeed, we will be visiting the likes of Amundi in a FinTech museum lined up next to old cheque books and broken fax machines… not dissimilar to the almost extinct horse and carriage.
Please read Amundi’s full response if you are interested as there are of course multiple angles to every story. But the fact remains that even stating a warning sign in respect of “loss of own jobs” before putting the interests of consumers first is not the way to go. Thanks Robert for addressing this (and for the reality check).
Time does fly when you’re having fun! Today has been exactly one year since my “official” move from the picturesque Dutch countryside to “The City”. And what a move it has turned out to be.
When I made the 45 minute jump supported by KLM/Cityjet, I arrived with no team, no FCA authorisation (we’d just applied before making the trip) and no UK client. Did I mention that we didn’t have an office or a bank account either?
Today I want to celebrate our journey over the past year…
In 365 days, we have enough weird, wonderful and crazy stories to make a three-part bestseller [think Lord of The Rings with less elves and more bankers and asset managers]. But we acknowledge that this year only represents one chapter, and we really can’t wait to write the rest of our book with our fantastic team.
So where are we now?
Client – We’ve signed our first UK Client who will use our technology stack and BPO services for their D2C investment solution (sorry, can’t share the name yet).
FCA – The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has awarded us with full authorisation.
Bank – honestly one of the most crappy and frustrating processes I’ve ever had to go through and it should not be in this list [even worse than going to the Dentist], but here it goes: opening up a personal and business bank account. It was such a reality check for me to realise what people in the UK have to go through to get this done (maybe more about this later…but it won’t be a pretty story to share).
Team – We are a team in the making: from flying solo to growing to a flock of 12 likeminded change fanatics whom I can navigate this journey with.
And the latter is perhaps the most important.
A team made up of unique and distinct individuals who differ in every way imaginable and yet share a unified sense of purpose and ambition.
So what’s my goal for next year?
To build one of the most diverse FinTech teams in the UK that just kicks ^$$. A team that lives, breathes and demonstrates our core values: exceed expectations, do more with less and give it all!
Whilst ambitious, I’m well aware that this will be the most challenging goal. So we need help. We are looking to hire about 20 more colleagues this year… are you looking for a new job or do you know someone? Please check www.ohpen.com or mail [email protected].
Thanks to everyone in the UK and our Dutch team who made the first part of this journey possible.
Affecting change isn’t easy (especially in the Financial Services industry). If it were easy, there would be no unique Ohpen UK team, no new office, no highs and lows, no story to tell… but where’s the fun in that?
