Women in FinTech Friday Feature – Lisa Nicholas

Meet Lisa Nicholas, President of 1 Up Digital Consulting. We had the pleasure of hearing from Lisa, recently, on LinkedIn Live on her passion and expertise in helping banks and credit unions digitally transform their organizations. Read more below on Lisa’s day to day and how she became a leading lady in the financial technology realm.

 

Q: How did you end up as a leader in the FinTech industry?

A: I’ve always been passionate about data and being relentlessly focused on results. That passion led me to leverage technology because manually manipulating spreadsheets was taking my teams too much time and we couldn’t focus on moving forward.

 

Q: What is an accomplishment that you are proud of?

A: The re-launch of the CUTX website which led to a W3 Gold Award. The website integrated over 50 forms into Salesforce, rate updates, journeys, lifestyle pages. This allowed us to advertise in relevant moments like marriage, new baby, new home, etc., KBB and Fuel integrations, DMP for personalization of more than 50% of the visitors and ability to tie in branch activity via a true attribution model.

 

Q: What advice would you give to young women today looking to start a career in the industry?

A: Find a mentor that can help you navigate and guide you in the space. You might even need different mentors as your career advances or takes on different challenges.

 

Q: What are you most excited about with new advances in technology today?

A: Building digital workforces through RPA. Banks and credit unions have so many manual processes and because the employees are focused on those manual processes they can’t focus on the customer or build strategic roadmaps for each individual customer. RPA will allow automation to do the mundane tasks and let the employee focus on more strategic tasks that will build and deepen relationships.

 

Q: As a female leader, how do you start your day? What are your tips for productivity in the midst of a busy schedule?

A: 1. I use tools like Asana and Quip to organize my day. Each day I make a list of three things that I will do before the day ends and I don’t end my day until they are completed.

2. Try to assess your schedule for the next day and excuse yourself from meetings that you don’t feel make sense or let the meeting organizer know that you have to leave early and that you would like to be on the agenda up front.

3. Too often we feel that we have to say yes to everything that comes our way. Being a leader means you actively help people who come to you seek their own answers and while it is hard to redirect or help people find their own answers it is necessary. It might take a few extra minutes, but long term helping them figure out how to do something you know will mean they learn and you are spreading institutional knowledge so that you don’t have to be the go to person all the time.

 

Q: What are some of your favorite ways to spend your time when you aren’t working? Any tips for relaxation and destressing?

A: 1. We own a few horses and I like to work at the farm helping my daughter with her horses.

2. Driving and walking is my destress time and the time where I innovate and think of new ways of doing things. Find a something that is mindless and always you to think freely.

 

Q: Is there one piece of technology you cannot live without?

A: Salesforce. This technology is the only tech stack that connects marketing, sales, operations, data, etc. in a frictionless manner.

 

Q: Anything else you would like to share.

A: My biggest lessons have come from my failures. Have a fail-fast mentality and never give up. Everyone has bad days and moments of weakness. Think of your failure as building blocks for your success later. Failure can mean opportunity later so take the life lesson adjust what didn’t work and move on.