Latest / Leaders In Payments / Women Leaders in Payments: Aglika Dotcheva, CFO at Riskified | Episode 416

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Women Leaders in Payments: Aglika Dotcheva, CFO at Riskified | Episode 416 · 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, our special guest is Aggie Dachiva, the CFO of Riskified.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: So, aggie, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
• 1:00
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me, Greg.
• 1:02
  Speaker 3: It's a pleasure to be here.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: Great, let's start out with just a little icebreaker kind of thing, if you don't mind.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: So if you could have dinner with any woman in history, past or present, who would that be and why and what kind of restaurant would you go to?
• 1:16
  Speaker 3: There are so many inspiring women it's really hard to choose just one, but one that stands out for me is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: She was a Supreme Court justice, brilliant lawyer, a feminist icon.
• 1:30
  Speaker 3: She fought all her life, throughout her career, for women's and gender rights.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: She argued and won so many cases that changed the life of people and the way the law treated women and minorities.
• 1:44
  Speaker 3: But what made her truly special wasn't just her brilliance, it was the ability to reach across the aisle and to make people that even disagreed with her respect her, and I think that this is a true quality and leadership, that it's rare, and I wish we had more of that today in the society.
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: So truly amazing women.
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: I would have loved to be able to meet her, but as for where we would go, since we both studied in Columbia University, I would probably choose a book field cafe near campus somewhere, and I'm sure we'll be able to reminisce about our time we spent there and I'm sure the conversation would be very interesting.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: I'd love to hear her wisdom and stories.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Great, great Thanks for sharing that.
• 2:40
  Speaker 2: I've asked that question obviously for each one of these episodes, and I think I've had one or two that had that named the same woman, but most of the time is different, so that's definitely another different one, so that's really unique.
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: I appreciate that.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: So let's start off talking a little bit about your background and your career.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Maybe tell us where you're born, where you studied, kind of what led you into payments.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: Studied kind of what led you into payments.
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: Of course.
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: So I was born and raised in Sofia, bulgaria.
• 3:07
  Speaker 3: I grew up in the 90s in Bulgaria, during very turbulent years when communism fell, and it was a time characteristic with a very difficult economy.
• 3:21
  Speaker 3: Money was tight and the country was shifting from a state-run economy to a very chaotic way of privatization.
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: I went to an English-speaking high school.
• 3:31
  Speaker 3: This was kind of late in my teenagehood and that really kind of helped me develop an affinity for English-speaking cultures.
• 3:39
  Speaker 3: Later on I studied law.
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: I followed in the footsteps of my father and sister, both lawyers, but my passion has always been in economics Since early on I loved reading economics books and I was always interested in how governments work, how money moves and how policy affects people's lives.
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: So 1997 was a memorable year for me and in that year I was a law student.
• 4:06
  Speaker 3: The economy was very turbulent and disastrous from some of the recent policy of the government at the time and I helped organize with other law students, colleagues of mine.
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: I helped organize a strike against the government.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: So that was quite a memorable experience.
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: And around the same time I also applied for for US Green Card Diversity Lottery and, unexpectedly for me, I won.
• 4:31
  Speaker 3: So this illusion with some of the reality in Bulgaria at this time.
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: I packed my bags and came to New York with $3,000 in my pockets.
• 4:42
  Speaker 3: After I came to New York it was late back in the 90s I worked for a year in a tech company.
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: After a year I applied and I transferred to study in Columbia University.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: So this is how I came to New York and then from there just thinking through my path to payments.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: It wasn't exactly linear, but just thinking back, you know things all connect at the end.
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: So at Columbia University I worked on a project that was sponsored by Bear Stearns.
• 5:11
  Speaker 3: It was a fixed income project where we created a historical database for all the bonds that had defaulted in the last century and it helped me develop expertise and domain expertise in fixed income at the time, which later on helped me apply and get an offer from another investment bank in that capital market.
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: But the economy, just as I was graduating, the economy deteriorated again, so the job offer got pulled and I ended up graduating without a job offer.
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: So that was quite a wrinkle.
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: I ended up taking a short-term project.
• 5:48
  Speaker 3: I worked for a CEO where I helped him fundraise.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: I developed a model for him.
• 5:54
  Speaker 3: I worked with him and his CTO and other product people in the company and I helped develop a financial model that would take the assumptions and the strategy that they had and really translate it into numbers.
• 6:07
  Speaker 3: So that was a very interesting experience and it appeared to be pivotal for me.
• 6:12
  Speaker 3: It's kind of opened the way for me to understand what it is to work in tech from finance side, and from there I moved on.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: I got a few kind of progressing roles in fixed income analytics.
• 6:25
  Speaker 3: Again, this was something that I felt comfortable with, but I realized that the experience of the tech company was much more motivating and fulfilling.
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: So I pursued different roles in FP&A.
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: I kind of moved direction.
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: I pursued different roles in FP&A and, after kind of gaining a solid experience in FP&A and getting my MBA at the same time I was working and studying at the same time I had a chance to join Riskified as the first finance hire as a VP finance.
• 6:58
  Speaker 3: That was almost 10 years ago and at Riskified we focus on preventing e-commerce fraud.
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: We help merchants approve more transaction legitimate transaction while we're protecting them against fraud, and this is closely tied to payments.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: So I have to ask the question so how does dad and sister feel that you kind of left the being a lawyer kind of pursuit that you were after at first?
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: My father was very supporting.
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: He was the one who used to buy me the books economics books.
• 7:28
  Speaker 3: Earlier on he was a voracious reader.
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: We had this big library in our house and for him it was important when I come here in the States, when I left, that I continue my studies.
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: So he said, if you're not going to be a lawyer, at least go back to school and finish what you do.
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: So I'm grateful.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: Great, great.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: So another quick kind of fun question If you're at a conference, you're going to be a speaker, which I know you've done.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: Before You're called up on stage, you have a hype song.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: What would that hype song be?
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: For me, that would be Lose Yourself from Eminem, and I truly believe that you have to give your everything when you have an opportunity.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: And this song, this name, resonates with me.
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: The lyrics are all about pressure, the chance, the urgency, and it's really all about going away, no holding back.
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: So you might only get one shot and it's up for you to take it or miss it.
• 8:25
  Speaker 3: And this resonates how I feel when I'm working on an opportunity or pursuing a passionate project.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Okay, okay, again another question that I've asked every time and it's been different.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: So I've yet to have two guests say the same exact hype song, so that's kind of cool.
• 8:40
  Speaker 2: So tell us a little bit more about what you do on a daily basis and maybe what excites you about your role there at Riskified.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: So my role has evolved.
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: As I said, I was the first finance hire at Risky Fight and in the beginning it was all about building our financial infrastructure from scratch, building the first finance model, figuring out the drivers, really managing even the cash runway, which is very important for an early stage company.
• 9:06
  Speaker 3: So I joined right after Series A and since then we've gone through a lot of transformation.
• 9:13
  Speaker 3: They were a public company, so it means that we had a long way to come here.
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: We went through a couple of different stages, a few different rounds of fundraising, and each stage had its own requirements and challenges.
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: As I said, in the beginning it was more about being a builder.
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: Later on it was more about working with other executive leaders across the organization to optimize for scale and growth.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: And then the IPO followed.
• 9:40
  Speaker 3: So it was all about scaling your team and building and preparing the company for being public ready.
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: And today, just as a public company CFO, a significant portion of my time is investor-driven.
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: I spend a lot of time just preparing for quarterly earnings which are incredibly challenging but also can be hugely rewarding and really investing with our investor community, kind of creating the dialogue and continuing to share Riskified's story, but beyond the numbers on a day-to-day like what really excites me, seeing the tangible impact we're making.
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: 2024 was a record year for us in terms of revenue and GMV and I'm very grateful to the team and proud of the team for being able to execute on the backdrop of a tough macroeconomic environment.
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: And beyond, that is also just seeing our advancements in AI, in our tech, and how our solutions, our products, are continuing to deliver a lot of value for major brands across more than 185 countries, so I find this truly motivating.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: Great.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: Well, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and lessons learned.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: So, as you well know and have experienced it, leadership has changed over the last 10, 15 years, as it always does.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: But how would you define modern leadership and how do you embody that on a daily basis?
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: Leadership is evolving, but some traits remain universal.
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: Leaders must have a clear strategic vision and ability to motivate and lead others At the same time.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: Adaptability is just as important, and I think that's something that has evolved as the priorities and challenges are shifting as there are more external, uncontrollable events that affect companies.
• 11:32
  Speaker 3: Effective leaders must be able to really be with their strategies and being adaptable and being able to remain flexible.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: If I think about Riskified, our strategy has changed through various growth cycles and every period had very specific needs and required for us to be able to be flexible and reinvest in the right areas for growth.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: Another factor is that it's important is that leaders can do it by themselves.
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: They motivate and inspire people around them, but it's also very important to be able to delegate and to empower the people on your team so that they can execute without you micromanaging them all the time.
• 12:12
  Speaker 3: Your team so that they can execute without you micromanaging them all the time.
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: So this has been very crucial for me to be able to delegate and to scale our team in a way that they're able to execute, and it's been like a very collaborative type of work as we continue to grow as a company, and you asked me about embodying it.
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: How do we embody leadership?
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: I think it's important to be able to execute adult type of environments.
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: Not everything is smooth, as always, but being resilient, being able to focus and execute is key.
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: And if I think about our IPO, we became a public company in 2021, just right in the midst of COVID so being able to execute in a very challenging environment where everything was very different was also key, and I'm proud of the team that were able to do it and have a successful IPO.
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: Well, when you step back and look at your career in life, have there been certain defining moments.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: I call them sort of aha moments, but moments that definitely defined kind of your career and who you are.
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: Definitely I think that two come to mind.
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: They were both linked to me kind of shifting in a different direction.
• 13:18
  Speaker 3: The first one was deciding not to pursue my law career and to kind of move into finance.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: So this is when I came to the US.
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: And the second one was when I entered into tech finance.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: This was just right after I graduated and my offer got pulled and I had to kind of think rapidly on the ground and shift direction.
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: So I'm happy the way it worked out.
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: But yeah, things don't always work as planned and you just have to be adaptable and take advantage of the situation.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: What do you think is something that women bring to the table that our industry needs more of?
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: I believe there's still a lot of bias women have to push through when they're going through what they want professionally, and our experiences make us more resilient.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: That's the flip side of that.
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: It helps us develop a long-term kind of a big picture view, and that's really helpful when you're working in a company and that it's in a very vast changing environment and you're helping it grow.
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: Going through so many challenges actually has a positive side effect.
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: You persevere and you become stronger.
• 14:26
  Speaker 3: Another important trait for women is, I believe, we have more empathy and we're better collaborators.
• 14:34
  Speaker 3: We can be better collaborators, so this is something that we can bring to the table and it's especially important when you're solving the problems and innovative and in tech.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a good segue.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about innovation and impact.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: So, as you well know, having been in this industry for many years, it's a fast changing.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: The innovation is always evolving, so how do you stay innovative as a leader?
• 14:58
  Speaker 3: As a CFO, I make sure we're always putting money behind what really matters, which is our core innovation, our machine learning models, our tech.
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: We're proud to have some of the smartest tech out there and my role as a CFO is to make sure that it continues to be this way, and part of it is continue to have a flexible financial strategy to make sure that we can tackle new markets and new challenges, new market shifts, but also continue to develop our platform by adding products that resonates with what our customers need and solve a real problem that they face.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: Well, what's one kind of change or trend in the industry that you're really keeping a close eye on?
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: When you look at how e-commerce has evolved, it's clear that fraudsters have become more sophisticated and watching closely how, as fraud kind of evolves, it's also kind of extending beyond the checkout to every touchpoint across the entire customer journey.
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: So for us, it's important to continue to innovate, continue to be as accurate as possible and to provide more value for our customers.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: And another key trend is the industry's focus on increasing legitimate authorization rates and reducing false declines.
• 16:17
  Speaker 3: If we think about it, billions are lost there and our products, especially our newest product, adaptive Checkout, directly addresses this, and we are focused on ensuring that more legitimate transactions are approved that more legitimate transactions are approved.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: I would assume one of your biggest challenges as a company is keeping up with AI and how the fraudsters are using AI in an unfortunately negative way to try to steal money from people, whether that's fraud on transactions or other kind of cybercrimes.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: But it just seems like as much as we want to use AI as positive, there are people out there that are using it for a negative reason as well.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: Absolutely.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: There are so many different ways that AI is helping me being a good and efficient in what I do to every day, but I can imagine fraudsters are just becoming just as efficient as well, and if you think about some of the AI agent shopping that you can do, I mean it's just poses so many different challenges that we'll have to tackle as we continue to as well.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: And if you think about some of the AI agent shopping that you can do, I mean it just poses so many different challenges that we'll have to tackle as we continue to work with our customers and approve more transactions.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: How do you think women leaders can influence the future direction of payments in fintech?
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: I think that, as new technologies are developed, and women can help and emphasize responsible innovation, especially when everything becoming more AI prevalent and there's a lot of conversation today about that.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: But I believe that technology should be developed with fairness, with consumer protection in mind as core principles, and women can definitely help in that area.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about mentorship and impact.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: So have you, over your career, had female mentors, or even male mentors, and what has that meant to you and how they kind of helped shape your career?
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: That's an interesting question.
• 18:05
  Speaker 3: I haven't had a traditional mentor in a way, but at the same time there's so many people throughout that have helped me in so many different ways.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: Probably the first one was the professor at Columbia University back in the day when I was a college student that kind of helped me think through some of the career opportunities that were in front of me.
• 18:23
  Speaker 3: He was in fixed income analytics and he was kind of helping me, pushing me in that way.
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: It appeared that my heart was somewhere else, but that's how you may have many influences around you, but at the end of the day, it's important to really think through what resonates with you and to pursue your own dreams.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: If I think of other mentors that have affected me, I'm inspired by strong, resilient women who can help not just execute but also kind of shape strategy in the company that they work for, and if I think of one such example, this is Sarah Fryer.
• 18:55
  Speaker 3: She was previously the CFO at Square and I remember this is like when I was just starting as a CFO.
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: She was definitely a role model to look up to, and partly what kind of was inspiring about her is that she wasn't just a CFO but she was also influencing product growth culture, and now she was seen as one of these rare CFOs that can actually walk the line and become a CEO one day, and that is a prediction that became true when she became CEO of Nextdoor.
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think we've had this discussion in several of these episodes, and it seems like the days and maybe this is part of just the evolving leadership, but the days of old of having these structured mentorship programs where you as an employee are assigned to a person and you have this agenda and you meet once a month, and it seems like sort of that mentorship is kind of faded to where it's more, kind of like how you described it, these people have influenced you, even though it's not like this formal mentorship type program.
• 19:59
  Speaker 2: So just interested on your thoughts on that, I completely agree.
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: As I said in the beginning, you can have many people around you that can mentor you because they've just kind of succeeded in what they do, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's your path.
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: So I feel that, especially in today's you know digital age, when there's so many resources available there, it is important for everybody to continue to educate themselves, to kind of truly understand what resonates with them and to look at different opportunities and not to follow necessarily just one mentor, because it's hard to find that somebody has just exactly walked this path that you're going to go through.
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: So if you had to give just one piece of advice let's say, females coming out of college, maybe they're changing careers and they want to move into payments or fintech, and you had to give them one piece of advice to help them be successful what would you tell them?
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: Oh, it's hard to just give one.
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: I have so many.
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: Well, I would say, I think don't be a numbers person or just a numbers person.
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: I think for me, when I came out of college, it was all about building the right model and getting to something very precise, but I realized that what really matters is that you need to dig in and understand the business inside out, and that's how you become a truly strategic leader.
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: And the other one is probably also to adopt a learning mindset.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: You can learn a lot in school and schools are great, but I believe that that's just not enough, and real, real, real growth comes from curiosity, from self-direction, from being able to kind of pursue the knowledge and being constantly on top of the most updated trends.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: So one final kind of fun question.
• 21:47
  Speaker 2: So when you look at your phone, what is the most popular non-business app that you use and what does that say about you?
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: I would say for me this is probably Audible and Spotify.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: I do listen to a lot of podcasts.
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: I love reading books.
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: I don't have a lot of time, I'm always on the go, so just listening through Spotify or Audible helps me keep up to date.
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: I listen to them when I'm working to work, when I'm going to the gym, when I'm in the backyard doing some gardening or when I'm just cooking, and I feel more productive doing that.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: Okay, great.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: Well, this has been a great episode.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: I really appreciate it and just want to kind of open the floor, see if there's any final thoughts, anything else you wanted to discuss before we wrap up the show.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: Of course.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: Actually, one more piece of advice comes to mind.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: I think that it's important to view challenges as opportunities.
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: One of the kind of the best experiences of learning is when things get tough and you truly understand what you're capable of.
• 22:50
  Speaker 3: So I've had this experience many times in my life, when the situation is difficult and, looking back, it is probably one of the more valuable experiences out there.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: So, in simple words, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: Stay up to the challenges and go with them.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: Great.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: I think that's a great way to close out the show.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: So, aggie, thank you so much for being on the show.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: I know your time is very valuable, so again, thank you so much for being here today.
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: Thank you for having me, greg, it was a pleasure.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: Great, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us this week Payments podcast.
• 23:25
  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.
• 23:32
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