Women in Finance

Shail Deep joined TransUnion in 2019 as Chief Product Officer. With over 20 years’ experience across retail banking and technology consulting, Shail’s role involves fuelling new product innovation, ensuring robust product quality and delivery, sourcing and incorporating new data assets and delivering valuable analytics insights and solutions.  

Previously Shail spent 16 years at HSBC, where she was Global Head of Strategic Partnerships and Innovation for HSBC Retail Banking and Wealth Management. Shail has held various leadership roles across cards, payments, risk, fraud, loyalty and proposition development spanning the UK, US, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Prior to HSBC, she worked with Citigroup (India) and i2 technologies (US).

Shail holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

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Lisa-Marie Fassl is the co-founder and CEO of Female Founders, Europe’s fastest growing community of female entrepreneurs. Lisa and her co-founder, Nina Wöss, set up Female Founders to empower women to start and scale ventures, as well as to tap into wider pools of leadership opportunities. Female Founders’ core accelerator program is now the go-to accelerator for women entrepreneurs looking for a comprehensive and inclusive program ranging topics from finance to mental health. Lisa is also a member of the Austrian Angel Investors Association, which she also led for a while. Since 2020, Lisa is a Member of the Startup Committee of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs.

Lisa is truly a role model with an enviable sense of purpose, energy, and authenticity. In this conversation, we unpack Lisa’s own personal and professional journey to becoming the supporter of women entrepreneurs in Europe and of startups in Austria.

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Elif Ulbrich is the co-founder of Contextual Solutions, a Berlin-based strategy consultancy, coaching and publication agency focused on fintech and legaltech. Elif and her team help entrepreneurs, SMEs, and corporations enter the ecosystem and strengthen their positions in the market by outsourcing the necessary tools and ideal or by facilitating connections to the network of experts. Elif is an avid avocate for diversity and digitization across industries. Elif was trained as a banking lawyer in Turkey before embarking on a discovering journey in the work of business and fintech in Germany.

There are so many aspects that resonate with me in Elif’s story, from pursuing her passion for technology outside of the bounds of her university training, to taking a leap and moving halfway across Europe to Germany, but what I find most inspiring is how Elif used curiosity, pragmatism, and commitment to high-quality work to build Contextual Solutions and serve her clients.

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Gabriela Herculano is the co-founder and CEO of iClima Earth, a leading green fintech that focused on helping investors find climate champions, i.e. listed companies that can decarbonise the planet. Gabriela has been an investor in the renewable energy space for many years and today she shares her journey from starting off as a financial analyst in Brazil to pioneering the impact green fintech space and launching the first equity benchmark composed of Climate Champions or listed securities that can help the world transition to a carbon neutrality. We also talk about activism and Gabriela’s lessons learned along her illustrious career which saw her speak at the COP26 in Glasgow.

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Margaret Reid is the Senior Portfolio Manager at The Private Bank at Union Bank. Margaret manages a broad array of investment portfolios on behalf of high-net-worth clients, trusts, foundations, and non-profit organizations. She works with a team of specialists in The Private Bank, and exclusive part of Union Bank, to provide wealth planning, investments, risk management, trust and estate services, and banking advice to clients and advisors.

Across her career, Margaret has been committed to supporting and empowering women both as growing and unstoppable economic force and as upcoming leaders in the investment industry. In this conversation Margaret shares her inspiring yet challenging journey into the world of finance and how she overcame numerous obstacles with persistence, hard work, and a continuous improvement mentality. Margaret also speaks about how she uses her role at the Private Bank to help women address their distinct financial needs.

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Tanya Rolfe and Nicole Denholder are the co-founders of Sophia, a newly launched platform dedicated to helping women manage their wealth and learn about investing. Sophia is the first platform taking a gender lens in financial education and inclusion in Asia. Both Tanya and Nicole have channeled their wealth of experience as investors (at Her Capital and Next Chapter Ventures) and advisors in and to women and women-led businesses.

In this conversation, Tanya and Nicole make the case for women looking for women angel investors. We also talk about Tanya’s and Nicole’s own challenges and lessons learned as female investors in Asia and the founding story of Sophia.

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Katerina Nichols wears several hats: interim chief financial officer, head of finance, controller, operational finance consultant, and Principal at Torq Partners, a Berlin-based consultancy and solution provider for building and optimising operating processes with a specialisation on the office of the CFO.

Katerina has a wealth of experience and knowledge around financial processes and solutions, having worn multiple hats across her career from investment controller to interim CFO. Katerina’s path in the industry was serendipitous but she discovered her passion for finance on the job.

Katerina’s story is one of passion and resiliency in the face of unwelcoming cultures within finance and certain companies. We talk about personal lessons learned but also best practice operational finance structures for entrepreneurs and founders.

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Dominique Mielle has spent 20 years as distressed bond investor, partner and senior portfolio manager at Canyon Capital, a $25bn hedge fund. Dominique was one of the very few hedge fund managers in the world when she retired from Canyon in 2018. 

In her memoir Damsel in Distressed published on September 7, 2021, Dominique offers more than just her insider view into the world of hedge funds – through her memoir, Dominique sets precedence for women who want a career investing and feel there is no way they can break into the boys club which is largely still the finance industry. The first memoir by a woman hedge fund manager, Damsel in Distressed is a witty account of Dominque’s accession through the ranks of hedge fund investing with all its challenges and awkwardness. 

In this conversation we talk about Dominique’s rise to be Canyon’s first female investment partner, why she wrote her recently published memoir and what is the unwritten message behind it, and the decline of hedge funds.

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Meghan Siripurapu is the Head of Credit and Fixed Income at Meraki Global Advisors, a leading outsourced trading platform servicing hedge funds, family offices, traditional asset managers, and corporates. Meghan started her career in investment banking focusing on fixed income capital markets and witness the Global Financial Crisis from the trading floor of Citi Bank in New York. She later moved to Loomis, Sayles and Company as a bond trader, before joining Meraki in April 2021.

In this interview, Meghan speaks about the early days as a fixed income trader and her career progression on Wall Street. We also talk about outsourced trading, an ever more relevant topic to increasingly digitized, post-COVID-19 pandemic world.

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Andrea Fernandez is the Co-founder and CEO of Vitamin, a financial platform focusing on providing women with guidance and tools to manage their wealth. Vitamin launched earlier this year and offers online courses aimed to build financial knowledge. Before starting Vitamin, Andrea had an illustrious career spanning from equity research analyst on Wall Street to Chief Merchandising Officer at FreshDirect, to Head of European Corporate Strategy at Allianz in Germany.

In this conversation we unpack Andrea’s impressive career which led to the founding of Vitamin. We also speak about her experience crossing the Atlantic and moving to Germany and beginning a career in a new country. It was fun to hear about Andrea’s own cultural discoveries once in Germany but what I enjoyed most was learning how Andrea is building Vitamin to be the platform of choice for women looking to learn more about managing and investing their money.

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