WORKWEEK

Fintech billionaire Jenny Just has a history of breaking through and breaking past the old boys club.  Starting as one of the first women to trade on the floor of the Chicago Options Exchange (there wasn’t even a women’s restroom within the vicinity of the men’s restroom at the time), she’s crossed the ranks of Wall Street in the…

Suppose you wanted to lend $1,000 to a stranger that passes you on the street. What would you need to know about that person before you’d feel comfortable?  Typically, banks use credit scores to determine if a consumer is trustworthy, but Shivani Siroya, founder and CEO of Tala, has built her fintech company with a new mentality.  Shivani’s mom…

There are about 700 billion reasons why we want gender equity in fintech.  The annual revenue opportunity left on the table by not serving women with financial services at the same level as men are estimated to be around $700 billion.  And to put that money into context, it is nearly double the size of Elon Musk’s silly little net worth.  “I just cannot fathom…

Only around 1 in 5 space industry workers are women.  For many years, the number of women in the aerospace industry has remained around 20%. However, so far, only 11% of astronauts have been women. And women CEOs represent 19% of the leaders in aerospace. Although over 560 people have traveled to space, less than 70 are women.  And of the 225 spacewalks that have been taken, only 15…

When the mobile video game “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood” launched in the summer of 2014, it was just another side project of the Kardashian empire to generate some extra cash.  It turns out it was one helluva lucrative side gig – earning around $200 million in revenue.  While the game is free to play, users could…

There’s a saying in sports that offense sells tickets, and defense wins games.  Cryptocurrency trading is only a tiny part of the financial technology sector, but it has been the offense. The excitement around crypto trading has “sold the tickets” and brought mainstream attention to our industry. This newfound attention has been both good and bad for fintech. On the one hand, it brings…