EKMH Innovators Interview Series
An interview series spotlighting global tech influencers, disruptors, visionaries, and of course, innovators.
First and foremost, American readers please register to vote. Here are some additional ways that global readers can also enact change. Pardon the insertion of politics: these crises will continue to worsen under this administration. To counterpoint these anxious times, the Innovators Interview series continues to focus on trailblazers who make change through active collaboration, empathetic leadership, agility, integrity, clarity, respect, self-awareness and the determination to learn from mistakes that often leads to disruption and innovation.
This week’s interview features the financial technology force FintechOS Head of Solution Architecture Andra Sonea. With her expertise in leading diverse, highly specialized teams on projects ranging from large systems implementations to new technology evaluations and roadmap advice, the LBS grad, former Anthemis fellow and University of Warwick researcher has a vast understanding of the architectural landscapes of some of the biggest banks in the world. Sonea’s career includes roles as a startup advisor, market analyst, banking innovation labs architect and innovation programs advisor in Europe and Asia.
As part of her doctoral program at the University of Warwick, Sonea focused on making the layers and interconnections between the physical and digital infrastructure required to deliver financial services visible. She employed a combination of spatial analysis and network science, by combining extensive financial services industry knowledge with data science methods for analyzing, surfacing, understanding the problems of this industry.
This past January Sonea joined the FintechOS team, helping drive its mission to change the way people engage with financial technology. The company’s namesake technology puts automation and personalization at the heart of innovation, allowing financial services providers to transform the digital customer experience quickly and affordably. With offices in London, Amsterdam, Vienna and Bucharest, FintechOS plans to expand its operations to the United States and Asia in 2020. The platform’s portfolio of global clients includes ERSTE, Vienna Insurance Group, Orange Money, Hyperion Group, TBI Bank, BT and Idea Bank.
In the last months FintechOS’ tech has been redesigned and re-engineered to help Financial Services organizations respond quickly to the COVID-19 crisis given the widespread behavioral change among consumers and also close any remaining digital gaps. The platform’s upgraded tech aims to empower clients to more easily roll out end-to-end, hyper-personalized digital customer journeys to market with unparalleled speed, enhance digital engagement and meet clients’ changing needs. Assistance solutions like co-browsing, video call centers, virtual branches have become a necessity as technical solutions for rapid, context agnostic implementation have often lacked in the market. To better address these new needs, FintechOS’ cloud-native technology was rebuilt and its data core enhanced with API (REST and SOAP) out-of-the-box capabilities to enable FS organizations to (re)act much faster, simply and safely to the new digital reality while ensuring business continuity for employees and customers.
I had the pleasure to connect with Sonea via email to learn more about her process and invaluable expertise on the intersections of academia and fintech, work+life balance, entrepreneurship, working on and leading global teams, and the value of social network tribes. Sonea also candidly discusses her experiences with hearing impairment in the workplace, underscoring that substantive changes are needed for inclusion policies to be a working reality. Our interview (with both American and British spelling) follows.
EKMH: Please discuss FintechOS’ mission for today and tomorrow’s post-covid economy. How does the company’s out-of-the-box, open-source, automative technology enable digital transformation and empower both traditional and cutting-edge clients?
Andra Sonea: FintechOS is a very ambitious company for which I am proud to work. Founded by two entrepreneurs I knew for many years, it was my personal trust in them that made me join the company. FintechOS started a few years ago by addressing the digital onboarding and origination journeys in a way that was easy, fast and not expensive to implement. Almost every financial institution in Romania uses at least some of their technology. Nowadays FintechOS does much more and has expanded across Europe. Its speed of developing new journeys or new components which sit deeper in the architecture of financial institutions, is somehow staggering. Obviously, COVID triggered a need for all businesses to be able to reach their clients and serve them digitally. This is what we do best, and fast.
Sonea joyfully holding a workshop at DDD Europe conference.
EKHM: Part of your role is leading diverse, highly specialized teams; how do you recommend building workplace diversity and successful teams? How do address pushback?
Andra Sonea: There is no recipe for a “successful team.” People define success in so many different ways. I personally like to work with people who know their domain and are interested to improve. They could be anywhere on this path, but the path toward wanting to really know, understand something, be good at it, is something I value a lot in my colleagues.
The teams with which I work are usually tasked to solve a problem. Not everybody is attracted to this type of work. It is tough, often unstructured and it does not give immediate rewards. There is some self-selection there. You cannot do this work unless you really like it.
I “take care” of my team and I am particularly interested that the young people with whom I work understand what is asked of them, get credit for their work, and feel comfortable to ask for help or clarity. I turn into fire at any sign of bullying or stealing somebody else’s work.
I worked for many years across the world in international, diverse teams. If anything, working for the first time after 22 years with a Romanian-only team is a bit of a culture shock.
EKMH: What techniques have you adapted in the “new normal” schedule to ensure you and your team’s connectivity and productivity?
Andra Sonea: The lockdown caught me delivering a project for a client. I worked with a team I had never met, both on our side and on client side. For four months we were on the phone every day for many hours. We used MSTeams a lot, even though this is not my favourite. I used a lot of Notion for structuring our work and collaborating with the client. We also used Jira for organising the delivery work and Slack for sharing interesting resources.
EKMH: How have you maintained a healthy work+life balance while working from home?
Andra Sonea: I didn’t. I tried. I found myself tied for hours on end on calls, programming for my research at night and reading and writing at the weekend. I was also meant to homeschool my son. A good and caring friend made Facebook appointments with me to make sure I did pilates regularly. I am obviously trying to change this imbalance and started running regularly.
EKMH: As a leader and innovator, when do you prefer working solo versus working with a team? What personal qualities have enabled you both to lead and collaborate well?
Andra Sonea: My preference depends on the stage of the problem I am trying to solve. I always need a lot of context before tackling a problem. For this, I read a lot. I never approach clients before doing extensive research on their business. In my work as a researcher, I treasure the rare times I can dedicate to one book, understanding a difficult concept or finally getting a bit of programming right. After the context phase though, in both academia and my job, I need collaborators. I thrive on interacting with people from other domains, understanding how they try to solve the same problem.
I would like to know what others think about working with me. If I were to guess what allows me to collaborate across cultures and professions, there are a few things which come to mind. First, I was an immigrant all my adult life. I lived and worked in Italy, Germany, France and UK. This experience makes me pay attention to others and myself. What works and what doesn’t is quite different across cultures and industries. You accumulate on the way a large bag of tools for interaction which serve multiple working styles. Second, I am deaf but this is not visible. Through this I learned to pay attention to less visible things in others. Third, I don’t stop learning and trying new things. My expertise comes from hard work. I recognise this in others and I appreciate it.
EKMH: Could you please share a bit more about your experiences, challenges and successes with regard to your hearing impairment?
Andra Sonea: I could probably write a book or do some stand-up comedy on this topic. I reached a point where the barriers to people with disabilities in the working world seem so absurd to me that I can communicate this absurdness only through dark humour.
All companies I worked for had, on paper, inclusive policies. Try however to obtain the slightest adjustment and you would have walls of bureaucracy or simply blank stares. Working for a global consultancy which imposed Blackberry mobile phones for its work force, I asked for the “major adjustment” to use my iPhone instead because it was connected to my hearing aids. It took me a few months and I ended up needing an approval from a VP of the company and made to thank for the favour to a chain of people who facilitated the introduction. In another organisation, transcription services for a few hours per month for call conferences with over thirty people, were not approved as a reasonable adjustment. Apparently, my discussions about some systems were too confidential and probably I was not even supposed to hear the discussions myself. The list is long.
On the way though, I’ve met some brave people with various disabilities whose determination and dignity stays with me to this day. I learned that most people do not declare their disabilities to their employees for fear of being discriminated or penalised. Because of this, they are effectively excluded from many activities – trainings not available to people with dyslexia or various learning or visual disorders, company events not available to deaf people.
I have also learned to provide information about my impairment and my very specific needs in a very matter of fact way. It helps me but I notice that often people still don’t know what to do with the information. If I am asked questions from the audience while I am on stage, my chances of understanding them are zero. People try to shout louder but this never helps. I have to ask somebody closer to me to repeat the question. I guess it looks strange.
Last year, I saw Haben Girma, the first deaf blind Harvard Law graduate, speaking in London at the Society of Computers and Law. She explained to the audience how she communicates and after her talk there was a long queue of people willing to communicate with her. I queued and told her, “I hope you know that you are very beautiful” and we laughed and chatted a bit. It was for me a profound lesson that if you want to be inclusive and you want to communicate, there is a way; however, people should not have to jump through endless tiring loops to achieve this.
Sonea radiantly smiling with her cohort of Anthemis fellows.
EKMH: How has your academic background benefited you as a transformation executive and architect in fintech ecosystem? What career advice do you have for other academics entering fintech?
Andra Sonea: While working for FintechOS I am still in academia, still working on my research in my “free time.” Academia and entrepreneurship have some things in common. In both you go after an idea that you see but others don’t. In both you need to go quite the distance until anybody has an inkling about what you are talking. In both, at least for a while, there is no material reward for your incredible efforts.
I would tell academics not to think about what we call “industry” – fintech or not - as a very different world. To name just a few options, you can do applied quantitative research with banks, insurers and regulators and have access to incredibly interesting data and the added satisfaction that your ideas will be applied in real life. Proper consulting work regularly exposes you to new problems that need to be addressed pretty fast with little information. A fintech platform would require (quite often) that hard push that a PhD candidate is accustomed to do before the deadline for a paper or conference submission. The rigor of the academic work prepares you for very well for the work in finance and technology.
Also, like in any industry, build a network. I’ve met some of the most influential people of my career on Twitter. It is not only what I learn from them and through them but the feeling of community and belonging is incredibly important for me. Hi Ruth Malan, Romeu Moura, Matthias Verraes, Peter Bakker, Diana Montalion, Julie Lerman and Simon Wardley! Find your online tribe(s) and learn from them and with them about the worlds you are interested in or trying to get into.
EKMH: As a former Startupbootcamp FinTech mentor, how can both entrepreneurs and investors benefit from mentorships, collaboration and/ or partnerships to promote growth and disruption?
Andra Sonea: Starting a company is difficult; it does not matter how good your idea is. A start-up growing very fast is an intense process which requires not only a continuous review of your technical decisions but more importantly an organisational resilience which is very difficult to achieve and sustain. On these journeys, a start-up needs mentors and advisors. It would be foolish to think that you know it all. Nobody does.
The relationship with the mentor is somehow “therapeutic.” You might not know where you need help. You might not be able to frame precisely why certain problems occur in the organisation. The mentors or advisors who listen might help you frame the problems, and through this, you can solve problems faster with their help, with the help of people from their network or even by yourself.
EKMH: And finally, which books and podcasts do you recommend for this summer and where do you hope to enjoy them?
Andra Sonea: My favourite podcasts are 99% Invisible, On Being and RadioLab. Professionally, I listen to Aperture and Anthemis Insurtech and 11:FS Fintech Insider.
I read mostly academic papers and books for my PhD. This summer I am going through the syllabus of Gabrielle Hecht on the Infrastructure and Power in the Global South. The last non-PhD related book I’ve read and would highly recommend is Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom. I consume a lot of information through Twitter.
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