Influential Women
of Houston
Jennifer Dominiquini
BBVA Compass Bank
Chief Marketing and Client Experience Officer
“You have to work to your unique strengths and to do that you have to find out what those strengths are — you need to know your story and how to tell it. You also need to be a little fearless, to put aside your fears, to be willing to challenge that status quo — to stand up, speak out and ask for what you want.”
Jennifer Dominiquini is banking on Houston’s authenticity
“It was a real bucket list experience,” says Jennifer Dominiquini, 45, referring to the 500-mile bike ride from St. Paul, Minnesota to Chicago she did last summer as part of a fundraiser for “Pursuit for Those With Disabilities.” For her part, Dominiquini, who serves as the Chief Marketing and Digital Sales Officer at BBVA Compass bank, raised a bit more than $20,000 – a drop in the nearly $13.5 million that was raised overall, but she feels it was an important contribution for her to make personally. “Sometimes, we marketers have a great message that we ourselves don’t embody, so there I was promoting this ride and thought to myself it was time for me step up and deliver. And in the end, it turned into the ride of a lifetime for me!” Today, Dominiquini says she’d like to do more cycling, but is limited to riding at the gym. “We’re just doing so many things at the bank, it has me very busy,” she says.
Dominiquini was herself mentored by some of the godfathers of business innovation and management strategy, including Michael Porter and Gary Hamill, so after she returned to the US and took an MBA at the University of Chicago, she became a board member of the University of Chicago’s Women in Business group for several years. “I think it is important for anyone in business, man or woman, to have support. One thing I realized over my many years in business is that you cannot do it all on your own.”
Every organization that is successful values innovation. But it all starts with people.
Dominiquini isn’t exaggerating. Since she arrived in Houston a little more than two years ago from Chicago, where she previously worked with Evite and Sears among other companies, she’s been a whirlwind of activity: there was Dominiquini serving as the face of BBVA during Super Bowl weekend, working with the 10,000 volunteers the bank brought together, there she is again, cooking meals with Chef Jordi Roca of Spain’s El Celler de Can Roca – No. 1 on Restaurant magazine’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants list – for the Food Bank in New York City, and yet again, posing with stars like James Harden at the NBA All-Star Weekend in New Orleans, in support of BBVA’s Bright Futures program. Raised in the New York suburbs, Dominiquini attended college in Pennsylvania, before a Fulbright Scholarship took her to Uruguay. She then spent nearly a decade in South America – in Columbia, Ecuador and Brazil – where she worked on innovation and branding programs for a variety of top firms. “This was well before the word ‘innovation’ became something of a business cliche,” she says. “And one thing I learned is that every organization that is successful values innovation. But it all starts with people.”
by Edward Nawotka
“Women today have every opportunity to advance themselves in business,” she says. “But you have to work to your unique strengths and to do that you have to find out what those strengths are – you need to know your story and how to tell it. You also need to be a little fearless, to put aside your fears, to be willing to challenge that status quo – to stand up, speak out and ask for what you want.”
For women (and, well, men too), she recommends putting together what her friend has dubbed a “girl gang.” She explains: “These are people that you trust, people who challenge you personally and in your career, the people who can stretch you and push you to the next level and support you in ways you cannot support yourself.” In this regard, she’s a big fan of actress and comedienne Amy Poehler’s organization Smart Girls, which offers a support network for teenage girls to “cultivate their authentic selves.” And this respect for authenticity is something she appreciates in Houston as well. “Houston is one of those places that not a lot of people know a lot about, but I am always telling people you don’t know what you don’t know about the city. When I got here I realized it was the people who make it special. The people in Houston are genuinely nice and open and warm. It’s a real community.” And so it appears that Dominiquini – a die hard Chicago Cubs fan – feels right at home, both here in Houston and at BBVA. BBVA’s philosophy is expressed simply as “Live Right” and it’s a principle which Dominiquini adheres to herself. “I always encourage people to bring positivity to their interactions. With positivity you can make things happen.”