Empowering women in the payments industry

Kristy Duncan, CEO and founder of Women in Payments, discusses the need for promoting gender equity in the payments and fintech industries, highlighting progress made so far, the challenges still faced and what women can do to succeed.

TFT: Kristy, tell us about you and why you started Women in Payments.

KD: I'm the founder and CEO of Women in Payments, a global association dedicated to promoting gender equality in the payments and fintech industries. I also describe myself as an engineer by training, a banker by trade, and a payments geek by nature.

In 2012, I started Women in Payments in Toronto. Back in those days, there was no such thing as DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), there was no such thing as ESG (environmental, social and governance) and there was no such thing as ERGs (employee resource groups). Those acronyms didn’t exist. As a woman working in the banking and technology and payments space, I was definitely in the minority. I wanted to provide women with more opportunities to speak at conferences, build their networks, and receive training, mentorship, sponsorship and leadership development. And now we've grown to six markets, so it’s very exciting.

TFT: What have been the highlights of Women in Payments over the last decade?

KD: Well, we couldn't do what we do without the support of some fantastic partners around the world. Over the years, we have built a fantastic number of partnerships with some really fantastic sponsors around the world of payments. They include big banks, a number of card schemes and other payment players, and they have helped us to cement support and to build out the programmes and the offering that we do. We have really enjoyed working with women around the world. We engage the innovators, the leaders, the experts and the rising stars and there are opportunities for all women in our industry to engage with us. We really love working with them and doing what we can to help them build their careers. because when we get gender parity at senior levels, or at least a third of women at senior levels, then we've got some role models for people in the organisation to aspire to. We've got studies that show that gender parity increases our employee retention, enables us to do better recruitment for employees and it helps us to develop our employees. It helps us to understand our stakeholders, our clients and our customers. So, when we've got that diversity at senior levels, that helps us to understand the diversity of our employee base, as well as our customers. eliminating the gender pay gap. We’ve got two things here, we've got the gender pay gap, and then we have equal pay for work of equal value. And I think we're getting closer to equal pay for work of equal value. I hope we are. But the gender pay gap is the average pay that someone in our organisation takes home as a man versus a woman. And typically, that is driven not only by lack of equal pay for work of equal value, but also the fact that there are more men in those leadership, higher paying roles, rather than the women who tend to be concentrated in the lower half of our organisations.

TFT: Can you explain what gender equity is and why it's important?

KD: Gender equality is what we strive to have on paper. Equity is actually making that happen in real life by giving equal opportunities to men, women and other strands of diversity for education, promotion, leadership and support. We need to make it equitable so that we can start to see some real results.

TFT: What can we do to speed up the process of closing the gender gap in financial services?

TFT: When do you think we won't need an association promoting gender equity in the fintech industry?

KD: Please do me out of a job, as this is really hard work! It seems to be that we're making slow progress and I sure hope that I'm not here in 100 years, and that we get to gender parity before then.

TFT: What's your best advice for someone wanting to start a career in the fintech industry?

TFT: Why is promoting diversity in the financial industry important?

KD: We're not at gender parity yet at leadership levels. Perhaps at the entry level and getting there in mid-levels of our organisations but at leadership levels, we still struggle to get gender parity in most of our organisations. There’s a huge opportunity here,

KD: We need more male allies who can be champions of change and support women as we build our careers. They can offer mentorship, sponsorship, help to call out gender bias, and see things in a different light. They can bridge the gap between where we are today and where we really want to be.

TFT: What more can we do to close the gender pay gap in financial services?

KD: Pay transparency is a sure-fire way of

KD: Put up your hand for opportunities, build your track record, build your network, and don't be shy about sharing your accomplishments with others. I used to think when I worked at a big bank that if I do a really good job sitting here in the corner that someone will notice and someone will promote me but that's not really how it works in real life. So, we have to be the CEO of our own career, find a personal board of directors and just drive your career in the direction that you really want it to go.