Latest / Leaders In Payments / Women Leaders in Payments: Kari Wilhelm, SVP of Data Strategy & Commercialization at Worldpay | Episode 418

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Women Leaders in Payments: Kari Wilhelm, SVP of Data Strategy & Commercialization at Worldpay | Episode 418 · Leaders In Payments

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, greg Myers, and this episode is part of our Women Leaders in Payments month, something we do every year in the month of July, and it's one of my favorite times of the year.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: This year's theme is redefining leadership, influence, impact and innovation, so those are some of the things you're going to be hearing about during the month of July.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: So, first, a special thank you to our sponsors.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Our title sponsor is WorldPay, our participating sponsors are VisiPay and Payrock, and our episode sponsors are the Clearinghouse and Genico and PaySafe.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: So special thanks to those companies.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: Today, I'm honored to have as our special guest Keri Wilhelm, the SVP of Data Strategy and Commercialization at WorldPay.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: So, keri, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: Thanks, Greg.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me.
• 1:06
  Speaker 2: Absolutely Well, let's start off with a little icebreaker, if you don't mind.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: If you could take any woman in history, past or present, to dinner, who would that be, and why, and what type of restaurant would you go to?
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: I racked my brains trying to think of a really intellectual answer to this question, but if I'm being honest with myself, the answer would probably be Meryl Streep.
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: I think she's absolutely the top of her field.
• 1:31
  Speaker 3: She's found a way to remain relevant for decades in an industry that rarely values aging women, and she's managed to do it while avoiding all of the drama that can come when you're in a highly public role.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: And I'd be really interested to pick her brain to understand her approach to creating those boundaries and avoiding that drama.
• 1:50
  Speaker 3: And how does she navigate the evolving landscape?
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: And I bet she has some really good stories that I would quite like to hear.
• 1:56
  Speaker 3: And if she agreed to have dinner with me, I don't really care where we go.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: Okay, okay, great, great answer.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: It's funny because we've you know, obviously I've asked that question many times.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: I think we've had one or two that had the same answer of who, really yeah, but overall it's been a lot of different answers, which makes it a lot of fun, which you'll get to hear over the course of the month.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit about your background and your career.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: So maybe tell us a little bit about where you grew up, where you studied, what led you into payments?
• 2:26
  Speaker 3: Sure, we moved around quite a bit when I was growing up, but I spent the majority of my childhood in Albuquerque, new Mexico, which most people know only from Breaking Bad, and then I went to Los Angeles for college.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: I went to USC, where I double majored in economics and comparative literature.
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: My first role after college was in Hong Kong, where I took a job working for the Asia Business Council as part of the Princeton in Asia Fellowship Program, and while I was there I did economic research for a group of CEOs and chairmen from leading global corporations that have a presence in the Asian market, and through that experience I became really familiar with management consulting, because one of the managing directors at a top consulting firm was on that council that I was working for, and so I began applying and I joined McKinsey Company in Los Angeles.
• 3:13
  Speaker 3: After finishing that fellowship in Hong Kong, in New York I went to business school at Kellogg through Northwestern University in Chicago and then, after business school, when I rejoined McKinsey, I fell in with the payments practitioners there and they were my favorite to work with.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: The people at McKinsey that were working in payments were really practical, really smart.
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: They were fun.
• 3:42
  Speaker 3: I really enjoyed my time on those teams and I really enjoyed our clients as well.
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: I felt like the clients that we were working with were working on really interesting problems and they were all in these high growth areas, really trying to tackle cutting edge type of questions, and so I found that I really liked working in that space more than some of the other industries that I dabbled in during my time there.
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: Then I ended up leaving McKinsey to follow a former McKinsey colleague to WorldPay.
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: Right as the pandemic was starting.
• 4:12
  Speaker 3: I joined WorldPay in June of 2020.
• 4:14
  Speaker 3: And I've had a number of roles during my time at WorldPay.
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: I came in to head up global sales operations for, initially, our e-commerce group and then, over time that expanded, I had global sales operations for the whole of WorldPay.
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: I spent time as the chief of staff to the president of Merchant Solutions when we were still part of FIS, and through that experience I got to be quite involved in the separation from FIS when we sold to GTCR.
• 4:44
  Speaker 3: And now I'm in a new role leading our data strategy and commercialization group.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: We'll dig into that in just a minute, but before we do, one more kind of fun question.
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: So if you're given a speech or invited to a conference, you have to come up on stage.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: You have a hype song.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: What would that hype song be?
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: It would be Shut Up and Dance With Me from Walk the Moon.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: That one is first of all, it's clean enough for a conference right, which is always important to strike that balance.
• 5:12
  Speaker 3: But it's also just so energetic.
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: It always kind of gets me going.
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: It always gets me hyped up.
• 5:18
  Speaker 3: I quite like that one.
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: I'm dancing at every wedding when they play that and because it's pretty clean, they play that at every wedding Right.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: Right, and that's another question that we've had very distinct answers to over the course of the interviews for the month.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: So another kind of a fun one.
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: Well, let's dive into what you're currently doing.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: So maybe tell us a little bit more about what you do and what excites you every day about your job.
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: Currently doing something very exciting and quite different than the work that I've done previously.
• 5:44
  Speaker 3: I'm building out a new line of business within WorldPay, and it's responsible for generating more value to our merchants by better leveraging our vast data assets.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: Worldpay is one of the largest merchant acquirers in the world and, as a result of that, we have unbelievable visibility and scale into everything from payment optimization to consumer behavior when it comes to the data that we see on a day-to-day basis, and right now my team is working on different opportunities to integrate data analytics and AI into new products so that we can bring those insights to improve the outcomes for our merchants.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: Okay, great.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: So let's move on and talk about some leadership and lessons learned.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: So obviously, over time, you know, the industry has changed, leadership has changed as well.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: So how would you define modern leadership and how do you sort of embody that on a daily basis?
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: Probably different questions.
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: You know, what is it versus how do you embody it, although the goal is always to make those two things converge over time.
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: When I think about outstanding leaders that I have worked for, to me there are a few common themes about what makes for a really great leader.
• 6:59
  Speaker 3: First, there's the importance of building the right culture on a team.
• 7:04
  Speaker 3: It's about listening more than you're speaking and picking up on when something is going unsaid, and you can kind of bring together these different opinions and kind of recognizing or harnessing the power of diverse teams.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: When I think about leaders that I've had in the past that I've really enjoyed working with or for, it feels like a more collaborative and more inclusive type of space.
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: Secondly, it's quite important to me to set clear expectations for team members and then give them the tools to meet those expectations.
• 7:35
  Speaker 3: It's not enough to say you know, I expect you to write a clear email to clients and it needs to go out 24 hours after they email you.
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: You also have to make sure they've had the training in what a clear email looks like and how to communicate in a concise manner, and this requires spending quite a lot of time on training or on an apprenticeship model, which is how I was trained, I think.
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: Thirdly, the importance of setting a clear goal, or set of goals, and prioritizing across them.
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: Teams work together so much more effectively when each person knows what their role is, what they are responsible for, and when everyone is working towards the same goal, kind of in the same order of priority really sure who's supposed to be doing what?
• 8:31
  Speaker 3: That's when balls tend to get dropped and that's also when people are enjoying their work less right.
• 8:34
  Speaker 3: They don't feel that they have the same sense of autonomy or ownership over the outcomes that they're driving.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: And I think that it's really the leader's job to set the team up for success in the way that they scope the work, prioritize the work and communicate that work out to the teams.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: And then, lastly, I do think it's quite important maybe this is this is to your point about embodiment I think it's really important to lead by example when something is important to you.
• 8:59
  Speaker 3: So if you are preaching that you value work-life balance and you don't want to see emails from your team on Saturday morning or something, then make sure you're not sending emails on Saturday morning.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: And if you're saying it's really important to pre-send documents, make sure that you're pre-sending documents and I think that these are a good team will take their cues from their leader and they will stay in the office as long as the leader stays in the office and try to mirror some of those behaviors.
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: So I think it's quite important to make sure that you're being honest with yourself about what example you're setting and making sure that that's in line with what you want the team to be doing.
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: When I think about how leadership has evolved over the past five years, you know, I came up in an apprenticeship-based model where you were with your team all day, every day, and having leaders that embodied these behaviors was a lot easier.
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: It was a lot more natural to get the training that you needed, to have discussions about prioritization when conflicts would come up, and now we're in a much more dispersed environment.
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: I work with teams that are much more geographically dispersed.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: I work with teams that are a lot more functionally dependent, right, where we have a lot more cross-functional dependencies and we have a lot more people who are trying to work virtually and we're trying to create these same cultures and these same spaces virtually, and I think it's much harder to do, and so what I try to do as a leader is, take these same behaviors and kind of create the infrastructure that will support them.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: So you know, how do you think about having a beginning or end of week check-in where everyone can stack hands on what the priorities are or stay in the loop on what major milestones have been reached in that week?
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: How do you think about bringing the team together in person when you can?
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: How frequently do you want to do that?
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: How do you maximize that time so that you're really dedicating some mindshare to team building?
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: And then, how do you think about assigning dedicated mentors or trainers to new joiners to the team to make sure that they have a real plan and we're not just handing someone a laptop and telling them to go forth and conquer right?
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: How do you make sure they're actually getting the training that they need?
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: And those are the types of things that I try to do on a regular basis but I think it continues to be a bit of a test and learn where we see what works for certain teams, what works for others and how you kind of build out these same concepts of creating the right inclusive structure, setting clear goals and priorities and making sure that people have the tools to execute on the expectations that you give them.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: So when you step back and look at your career or your life, have you had any of those I call them aha moments, but those moments that really maybe defined your life or defined your career?
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: I mean there probably have been many just because my career has been pretty decidedly nonlinear and I've taken a path where, rather than going extremely deep on one area of expertise, I've gotten a lot more exposure to different areas through the roles that I've taken and I've tended to follow people more than I've followed content.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: I think what that has taught me is I've really experienced that kind of non-linearity as more of a strength rather than a setback rather than a setback.
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: And the first and the most defining example of that for me was when I joined traditional management consulting after my year in Hong Kong working on that economic council.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: I was at the time a really non-traditional hire for these types of firms.
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: I came from a non-core school.
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: I had spent a year out of school, so I would be interviewing to join with recent grads, even though I'd already been out of school for one to two years by the time I joined.
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: And I didn't have and I was a liberal arts major who hadn't had a lot of exposure to that type of interview process prior to doing it, and I really got that job.
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: Out of sheer grit and force of will I forced myself to network.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: I'm not actually a born networker.
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: I did over 100 cold calls with people that I'd met in Hong Kong, trying to figure out what this industry was, who the right companies would be for what I was looking for, who they knew that might be able to help me get a foot in the door.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: I taught myself how to case for those interviews.
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: I applied to a really wide selection of firms so that I had some room to fail and kind of learn through real interviews as we went and then by the time I finally got that job offer at McKinsey, I felt really prepared for what was in front of me.
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: That job really introduced me to some of the best leaders and some of the best people that I've gotten to work with in my career.
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: I learned so so much, but I think through that experience I really saw the results of betting on myself and working really hard towards a specific goal and it made everything feel possible and I think for me it also made me a lot more comfortable taking risks or taking opportunities that weren't necessarily a sure thing, because I knew that at the end of it it was all going to be okay.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: You can find your way back to whatever it is that you're trying to get to, depending on how you approach it.
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: So I think it gave me a lot of confidence that careers can be non-linear and oftentimes those experiences are going to be the ones that are the most formulative for you professionally.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: Okay, so what would you say is something that women leaders bring to the table that our industry needs more of?
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: In my experience, women tend to be very successful working cross-functionally and they're quite successful at building consensus across different stakeholders.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: I think oftentimes women are very adept in their ability to really listen to the other perspectives and understand what the underlying needs or asks are, rather than just listening to what's at the surface level.
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: They're able to kind of piece together where is this coming from?
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: What are we actually solving for, in a way that lends itself to building alignment or lends itself to kind of compromise that works for everyone, and there's always going to be a balance, I think, between building alignment and then making swift decisions when you need to.
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: But in all industries you really need leaders who can walk that line and understand when it's a time for decisiveness and when it's a time for consensus, and I think women leaders are quite good at navigating that line and are much more effective as a result.
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about innovation and influence.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: So, as we've talked about, payments is ever-changing and fast-changing, very innovative industry.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: So how do you, as a leader, stay innovative?
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: You know there's no right answer.
• 15:56
  Speaker 3: I think it depends a little bit on your approach to learning and how you as an individual can find yourself staying curious about these different things.
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: I think for me, I'm really curious not only about payments but about other industries, and I think payments is kind of a fascinating corner of the world where it touches nearly everything.
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: Right, every industry needs to be able to make and accept payments and, as a result, if you can understand that, the innovation that's happening in these other industries, what problems are coming up for those companies?
• 16:32
  Speaker 3: What are they solving for?
• 16:34
  Speaker 3: That's usually quite a good place to start when you say how can we be innovating within our own space?
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: Okay, so what is one trend or change going?
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: on in the industry that you're keeping a really close eye on.
• 16:49
  Speaker 3: Well, my current role is focused on data and I think that's quite a hot topic right now across this and other industries data, ai, agenda, commerce, all of the different developments that are happening in that space.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: So right now I'm highly interested in the emergence of Gen AI, how it's impacting industries and the potential impact of agentic on traditional e-commerce transactions and consumer purchasing behavior, because I think we're starting to see, or folks are starting to play with the different models that we could see a lot more of in the future.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, AI is a very common answer to that, because I think it's touching our lives personally, professionally.
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: And then, when you think about payments to your point, you know there's changes going on that's going to affect how consumers purchase, but there's also things going on within payments companies, around fraud and fighting fraud.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: You know all those kinds of things.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: So it's a powerful topic and you're right there in the thick of it, so it's gotta be exciting work.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think you're right and to some extent it's a buzzword for everyone right now, but I think that's because the impact has, to your point, felt really swift and we've kind of gone from this is the type of thing that's happening more in sandboxes in Silicon Valley to the type of thing that people are rolling out regularly and incorporating into their daily lives, and that's going to have a lot of impacts within your company and how you operate.
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: But it's also going to have a lot of impacts on how people buy, how they prefer to make purchases, how they find what they're looking for.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: And.
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: I think that's all really interesting to try to sort through.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: Sure, absolutely.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Well, how do you think that women can help influence the future direction of this industry?
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: I mean by being a part of it right, and I think you don't necessarily have to be a senior leader in your organization to make a big impact.
• 18:39
  Speaker 3: In fact, many of the people that I most respect in the payments industry are in a really specific part of the business relatively, you know, relatively junior, but they know their area so well and they're working so hard to build expertise in that area and they're bringing ideas about small improvements to products or to processes or to the thinking in their space.
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: And they're bringing ideas about small improvements to products or to processes or to the thinking in their space.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: And they're being really willing to participate in discussions at earlier stages Right.
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: They're interested in getting those ideas out on the table and doing a lot more kind of brainstorming around it, ways that you can really begin to influence the direction of payments more broadly and make incremental changes that end up really building us towards whatever direction we're headed.
• 19:27
  Speaker 2: Well, let's talk a little bit now about mentorship and impact.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: So have you had female mentors in your career and how have they helped to shape your career?
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: I have had female mentors in my career.
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: I've also had a lot of great male mentors in my career.
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: I think mentorship in general is an incredibly important part of navigating the different aspects of your career, from sort of day-to-day problems that you're solving to where you want to go longer term.
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: When I think about the influence that some of the women that I've been around have had on me, I've had the privilege of working with some incredibly strong female leaders.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: I had Stephanie Ferris as the CEO of FIS.
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: I worked really closely with Michaela Weber, who is over at BigCommerce, and Anna Mendy, who's over at PayPal, and I think what's struck me about all of these women is they're all outstanding and they're all incredibly different and they've got very big variations in their style and in their approach.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: They've got different personalities, they've got different strengths, they've got different passion projects, and I think what I have observed in working with these different individuals is that they are always the most effective when they are operating in a way that is authentic to them as an individual.
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: I think when I was earlier in my career, I was highly attuned to the fact that, as a young woman, the way that I looked or spoke or the way that I inserted myself in a conversation or, you know, more often, chose not to insert myself in a conversation impacted the way that I was perceived, and that's true for everyone, of course.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: Right, the way that you engage with people is how you're perceived, but I think understanding the importance of authenticity has really helped me to grow much more comfortable in the way that I interact with my colleagues and my superiors and make work feel much more collaborative than when you're constantly second guessing.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: Right, you know what's the best way to.
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: How should I be standing in front of these people?
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: Do I tell them something?
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: Do I not tell them something?
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: Right, I think?
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: I think my style is different than Michaela's or Anna's or Stephanie's, but it can be just as effective, as long as it's true to me.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: So you know, I like to ask some follow-on questions about mentorship because I think it's incredibly important and it's a big part of this series that we're doing, and we've had some people talk about mentorship versus sponsorship and the difference there.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think one of the important things I'd love to get your feedback is, you know, having the I don't know what the right word is, but the ability to go out and find your own course when it comes to mentorship.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: Like a lot of big companies have specific programs that you can sign up for and you've got this structured.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: You know, every month you're going to meet and there's an agenda and all that.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: But I think there's a lot more to mentorship and I like you know, if you don't mind, maybe talk a little bit about your thoughts on that, how maybe younger women coming up in our industry, how they can kind of do that on their own without relying on their company, and maybe just you know kind of your thoughts on that.
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: I'll take two different lenses.
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: I think there's me as a young woman and then there's there's me as a leader and kind of what I've seen on both sides of it.
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: When I was earlier in my career, by default the best mentors that I had ended up being my managers or my manager's managers while I was working with them right.
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: They were the ones that knew me really well.
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: They were able to see where I was strong and where I needed development and they were able to understand kind of the circumstances that I would bring to them with questions and those relationships evolved really naturally.
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: I think I needed to ask right.
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: I needed to ask for feedback, I needed to you often get the guidance that you need to like really formally ask will you be my mentor?
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: And I don't think I did that but I was.
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: I was constantly asking for feedback after you know work that I did or presentations that I delivered, and I think that that evolved.
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: That evolved really organically and in a way that felt really genuine and kind of safe to me as a leader.
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: I've participated in mentorship programs, both kind of at the of at the corporate level, and then I've had people come to me and say, hey, I was looking at your background and it was really interesting to me for reasons A, b and C.
• 24:01
  Speaker 3: Do you think that you know we could do a conversation?
• 24:06
  Speaker 3: And that's kind of been how people have come to me for mentorship, and that's kind of been how people have come to me for mentorship.
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: And so what I would say to young women who are looking for mentors is like fit is quite important, right.
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: So look across the company or look outside the company and say who do I want to emulate for certain reasons, or whose opinion do I value?
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: And then just ask them for a little time, right, just ask them for a little bit of coffee chat and when you go, have a specific question that they can engage on, right, don't say, like, what do I do with my life which I've been like, quite guilty of doing in the past and is never good right, not good for the mentor, not good for the mentee, not useful.
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: But when you go and you say I'm really struggling with this particular interpersonal relationship, here are the dynamics, here's what I need to achieve how would you think about right navigating this situation?
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: That type of thing is really helpful for mentors to kind of engage and sink their teeth into.
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: You often hear it said, but it really can't be emphasized enough.
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: The mentor tends to get as much out of these relationships as the mentee does.
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: Giving advice to younger colleagues.
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: I'll hear myself spouting these best practices that I'd forgotten, that I knew and that I really need to bring back into my day-to-day life, and it acts as this really positive reminder about all right, you know where do I need to be tweaking my approach, and so I really like that and I get really invested in these young professionals and I certainly have found as a mentee that that's quite true.
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: Both men and women are pretty interested in helping you know.
• 26:01
  Speaker 3: Ambitious, hardworking, smart young women succeed, and so if you make yourself available to that, you let them know that you're interested and you give them something chewy that they can really opine on.
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: I find that these relationships are much easier to maintain as a result of that, rather than some of the more formalized programs which sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you find a really good fit that way, but oftentimes it's going to be a little bit more organic.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: So it's a good segue into the next question.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: So if you had to give a female maybe up and coming, maybe they're right out of school, maybe they're changing careers or changing industries or coming into payments If you could give them just one piece of advice, what would that be?
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: I think payments as an industry feels somewhat foreign to many people.
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: It's not necessarily an area where recent college grads are actively pursuing, and many people find their way into payments through more circumstantial routes, and I think that's perfectly okay, and so what I would recommend to somebody who's just entering the industry is to try to build your understanding and build your expertise.
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: Remember that there are always people that know more than you do, and so be really open and proactive about asking for help, asking for advice or even just asking for an intro, a 101, to a part of the business that is new to you.
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: I did that when I joined WorldPay.
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: I asked a woman that I really respect in the business for an overview of our pricing.
• 27:39
  Speaker 3: I was like I haven't done this before.
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: Right, give me the 101.
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: And I found people were incredibly willing to do that, and so I think, if you're coming into it, don't be intimidated by the fact that this is a kind of a niche industry, one that requires a lot of expertise or a lot of understanding of the different complexities that are there, but instead start with where you are and then expand out by asking questions and seeking out advice.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: So one final kind of fun question so when you look at your phone, which app do you use the most?
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: That's non-business related, and what does that say about you?
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: You should probably tell me what it says about me.
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: I've got two answers to it, because I've got my normal answer.
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: And then this week, what is it?
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: It normally it's spotify.
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: I live in a very music forward house.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: We always have music going in the background and I historically, when I'm not on calls, have worked with classical music in the background something without lyrics, because otherwise I'll get kind of distracted, but the classical music works really well in the background.
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: And then I like podcasts for when I'm commuting or if I'm out on walks in my neighborhood.
• 28:55
  Speaker 3: But lately my top app has been the app for my children's preschool, because I just potty trained my two and a half year old twins and I am obsessively checking to see how that is going.
• 29:11
  Speaker 3: Have we had any accidents at school today?
• 29:13
  Speaker 3: Were they successful?
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: And I'm feeling extremely invested in that journey.
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: So for the past week that's occupied my top spot.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there have been many answers related to kids, so so so your answer is definitely in alignment, and Spotify has also been a popular answer, so so that's cool.
• 29:31
  Speaker 3: It's shocking how many apps you need to raise a kid.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: Well, as they get older they become, You've got to go to school you've got to grow everything.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: And as they get older, it becomes more financial, and I've had many answers around.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: All I do is send money to my kids, and that's either Zelle or PayPal or whatever it might be.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, that's a common answer as well.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: Well, keri, we've covered a lot of ground.
• 29:54
  Speaker 2: I think we've covered all the topics we wanted to, but I did want to just open the floor, see if there was anything else you wanted to talk about before we wrap up the show.
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: I don't think I have anything else to add, but thank you so much, Greg, for having me.
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: I really appreciate it.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Carrie, it's been great Again.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you being here.
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: You too have a great day.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: You too, and to all you listeners out there.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes.
• 30:29
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