On this episode of The Vurge, Rebecca welcomes Maggie Rigaux, Chief Growth Officer at Credivera. Her story is a testament to adaptability and foresight, from crunching numbers to shaping the future of credential verification. Maggie isn't just about tech; she's a beacon for harnessing its power to put us in the driver's seat of our personal data.
Her passion for breaking barriers extends beyond the digital realm. An advocate for female empowerment and the necessity of women lifting each other up in male-dominated arenas, she shares insights into creating a company culture that thrived during the pandemic, with mentorship and positivity at its core.
Thanks for listening! Like what you hear? Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and be sure to subscribe to The Vurge for the latest episodes and more!
Interested in being a guest on the show? Click here to learn more.
On this episode of The Vurge, Rebecca welcomes Maggie Rigaux, Chief Growth Officer at Credivera. Her story is a testament to adaptability and foresight, from crunching numbers to shaping the future of credential verification. Maggie isn't just about tech; she's a beacon for harnessing its power to put us in the driver's seat of our personal data.
Her passion for breaking barriers extends beyond the digital realm. An advocate for female empowerment and the necessity of women lifting each other up in male-dominated arenas, she shares insights into creating a company culture that thrived during the pandemic, with mentorship and positivity at its core.
Thanks for listening! Like what you hear? Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and be sure to subscribe to The Vurge for the latest episodes and more!
Interested in being a guest on the show? Click here to learn more.
Hey everyone, we are back for another episode of the Verge. Today we have Maggie, the Chief Growth Officer of CrediVera. Welcome, Maggie. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your career, how you ended up as a Chief Growth Officer as a female? And, yeah, give us some background.
Speaker 2:Well it's. I think sometimes people call me the original millennial I've had about. I've definitely had over 27 career shifts in my lifetime. I started my world as an accountant, if you can imagine and if you know me, you'll know that I'm definitely not a quintessential accountant. But I worked in Dirlene Completions right out of university, had a fascinating view of field operations, probably that sort of informed a lot of what I've done in later years.
Speaker 2:I transitioned into technology in the early days of computing and I fell in love with it. It was kind of a it's nice to see a tool that helped solve business problems and I've always taken technology in that perspective. I've done everything from R&D to application development, customer support, software implementation, you name it. I've done the gamut. Throughout my career. I've had the absolute pleasure of working with people, really really smart people, and I've managed to be on all continents, which is kind of fun, except Antarctica. They haven't. They haven't got me there yet, but it's in the hands, I'm sure. Okay.
Speaker 2:So prior to my current gig, I ran a boutique resourcing company. We ran contingent workers for telco, oil and gas utilities and cannabis, which is legal here, and I did that for over a decade. I love the challenge of beating people to fill a job crack. I'm a little competitive, I think, and I love being committed for finding unicorns to fill tough roles and ensuring that compliance and good practices are the core of everything I did. I think I'm a little allergic to inefficiencies and bad business practices so, as a side hustle, I did some consulting with companies on how to implement their contingent worker strategies and ensure that they were efficient and compliant, cost-effective. All that good stuff Awesome.
Speaker 1:And why don't you tell us about what you're doing now? Because you guys are a startup, up-and-coming company, super exciting, launching out to all. You know avenues and you have a few healthcare clients. But I think the tool would be great for large even smaller healthcare organizations as well.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. So a few years ago I don't know if we're technically still a startup, I think we're kind of edging into the growth phase of things but a few years ago I started. I joined a couple of dear friends in creating a digital identity in the workplace. So Credit Vara is a technology company. We're based here in Calgary, alberta, canada, and we're a leader in the secure, open exchange of verified credentials, of digital identity solutions. We created a digital wallet and a service behind it that consolidates all of your information and checks it out at source and makes sure it's presented in real time. And it's leveraging a little bit. It's leveraging Web 3 technologies and open standards and we created this digital ecosystem. We like to call it the triangle of trust. We connect employers and workers and authorized issuers to share this information in real time, make sure it's valid and not to date. So it eliminates fraud and misrepresentations by including issuing bodies and it speeds up onboarding. So anybody's looking at multiple weeks stuff on onboarding new staff should give me a shout. You verify skills and capabilities and they're as valid on day one as they are throughout their tenure of an individual, so we make sure that everybody's always in good standing.
Speaker 2:It's a really elegant tool. It's an elegant solution to a fairly complex problem, and at the very core of this we put the individual, and an individual gets to control their data and decide how it's shared and who it's shared with, which is pretty unusual in the world now. I mean, we're so used to throwing our information madly into the internet to see where it lands, and now we get to be more specific, more deliberate about sharing and revoking that information when it no longer serves us. So again, there's the individual that's involved in our solution, the employer who has or makes business decisions based on the information that the individual shares with them. And issuing bodies and that can be anyone from. You know, issuers of a background check, issuers of a credential or skills a skill credential can activate their position in this ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so people that are in the union or healthcare workers that have to go through rigorous?
Speaker 3:tests and.
Speaker 1:TB and immunizations and then, but then to have it right there for the actual employee to see as well.
Speaker 2:It's so happy and.
Speaker 1:I call my employer and say can you send XYZ to my new employer because I didn't have my immunizations, or you know whatever it might be Right.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting because we've had a lot of feedback from people who are the actual users of these wallets and they say it's so convenient to have everything in one spot.
Speaker 2:Because you're right In a lot of instances you are that person that's traveling around to different places and, inevitably, the ability to share that is tough Used to be that you'd call a big binder of all your skills and credentials around with you, and this is a digital representation of that. It's secure, it's tamper proof, it's immutable. It's really an elegant way of sharing information that you have to have with you on your journal and you can update it with your occupational health tests. You can do all sorts of things. So you know, I know in the healthcare industry, of course, there's a lot of that information is very tightly held and you want to make sure that you have a trustable environment to. That is the originating source or the source of truth, and what we have is the ability to take that source of truth information and put it into a digital format or to be shared in a way that is very private and very secure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I see the solution good for, like my husband's company which is a form of construction demolition, and all the union people, but then I also see it working really well for travelers you know healthcare travelers, and then also in HIT we have so many consultants. They have to go on a three-week gig or a three-month gig and they have to keep recertifying themselves at each organization.
Speaker 2:Right, it's really lovely. I think the convenience of it is really what got me. Initially I was so excited because I had some workers who were showing up on an oil and gas site and they were traveling six or seven hours from their home to show up at a site, show their credentials to a person who was guarding the site to ensure that they were in good standing, and that poor Schmo who was sitting there making that determination, had really no way of actually determining whether or not the credentials were good or in good standing or if they were just created in the local fraud credential right Cottage industry. So, yeah, it's really a much easier manner, easier way to share this information and the cool part is that you're right, the use cases for this are huge.
Speaker 2:We started our journey actually in construction and we found that we've moved into real estate, into legal areas, into health area, to all sorts of different environments, because the need is the same regardless of where you go, you need to make sure that you have credentials, you know who the person is that's showing up on your site, you know what they can do and you can prove what they can do through their credentials and their occupational health tests and all that good stuff. So it's been getting changing in a lot of industries for sure.
Speaker 1:So what if I'm an organization that utilizes your product but then I'm going to an organization that doesn't utilize the product? How does that? How is that received? How? And how does that organization that doesn't use it like know to trust you and trust that information and not have to go through the whole process again?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting because certainly a lot of places we're not everywhere yet, obviously, but we certainly want to be and the ability to share that information is easy, regardless of who you are. So if you are a company that isn't using it yet, you can be. So we're a very quick setup. We have the easiest easiest integrations you've ever seen, and I know every technology company says that, but we actually mean it. I think one of the great things about us is we're all from a technical background, so we've made this very smooth and very easy to integrate. It's hours and minutes, not days and weeks and months, to get our systems up and usable. We can share information across all sorts of boundaries that are quite it's quite exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, then you can share with the HR or integrate with the HR softwares as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've already done a few and we're agnostic, so what we like to say is we'll integrate with anybody that would like to integrate with us. So we are based on open standards, and that makes it pretty simple. We haven't found an integration that has stumped us yet. That may come, but certainly it isn't part of our, of our world view yet, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1:So, pivoting over being a female leader and a chief executive, what has been some of the obstacles that you have had to jump over or overcome, or you know any mentors that really stick out to you that helped you along the way?
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting because we have our chief technology officer, who is actually one of the co-founders is also female. I've been very fortunate or very prescribed I'm not never sure which but I've been lucky enough to have a bunch of incredibly strong female mentors throughout my life and I've also been one. So we're all big advocates for women leaders. We have three on our executive. Three out of five are women, which is pretty incredible statistics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I know it's kind of funny when you sit back and you go, but I think we are always about skills base. We are more about giving the opportunity to the people, regardless of their gender or their age or their whatever comes up. We have always been collectively and independently. We're also we're all very strong mentors and advocates and I feel like once you start to advocate and champion women, they just gravitate towards you. You have lots of choices. You determine that you're going to make lots of choices in women candidates and I think I've always searched out women candidates as part of the mix. So it's never been an issue that I've had to deal with, which is strange because literally I started in the most redneck kind of environment you could possibly imagine Field operations and oil and gas. It doesn't get much more.
Speaker 1:Not many females there, right Traditional.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even then, which was weird, there were actually female reg engineers, so it was quite funny. So I think it's been my destiny to be part of a female led environment for all my life and I take it seriously when we actually move forward with it, so it's pretty exciting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I saw a post a few days ago of a woman talking about how other women are not helping each other and why are we intimidating each other, and I commented back that there's enough glass ceiling for us to still break, that we can be kind and be empathetic and still help each other out.
Speaker 2:You know that's true and it's actually. I'm known as somebody who encourages women. I love to advocate their businesses, I love to support their businesses, either from a mentorship perspective or just even from an end user perspective. So I feel like you just have to live it and you have to be serious about it every day, and that manifests itself in these wonderful women doing incredible things that we can all share in. It's been fabulous.
Speaker 1:So tell me about your organization through COVID. Are you all still remote? Are you coming back into the office, and how the organization handle that transition.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, we are. We're pretty distributed geographically. We have people in the Northeast United States, we have people in Eastern Canada, we have people here in Calgary and people in Edmonton. So we we're not a huge shop, we're a little over 20 people. We are geographically dispersed, but we do.
Speaker 2:We do take culture very seriously in our organization and culture is partly partly created by those serendipitous moments that you can get together and collaborate, and we spend a lot of time and energy doing that. So we actually have we have an office downtown which is behind me. You may not see this in the podcast world, but we do have an, an essentialized space that we can actually meet. We do encourage people to show up a couple of days a week at least. We do create events that we get together that we can collaborate in, and we also have a very strong reward mechanism around our, our culture, our goats culture and how we actually interact with each other. So we have a very important we feel it's very important to how we work as a team and the product that we create, because we have a very brilliant group of people that actually contribute every day to making it better and better. So we are working hard to ensure that that, regardless of whether we're at home or work or some combination thereof, that we're all contributing and collaborating.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it speaks to your leader as well. Right, I have the ability to know Dan quite well. We've met in person a few times, yes, and I had to call him out on the podcast. He's gonna listen and I absolutely. But his leadership and his go get a attitude and so positive all the time with such a big smile. I mean it just helps lead the organization to greatness, right 100%.
Speaker 2:It couldn't. We couldn't have a better leader. He's just all things to all people. He's just incredible. He's fun, he's serious. He's got a brilliant mind. He envisioned this solution prior to it being a thing and you know it's been recognized now as a really interesting event in the industry. And he's been. He's I don't even know how to describe him. He has all that in the bag of chips.
Speaker 1:I would describe him as I like to gravitate to people that are just like jumping out of their skin, excited about something Right. He just jumps out of his skin Like you can just feel the aura like from far away you really can.
Speaker 2:From miles away, yeah, from, hopefully from space, yes, yeah, really.
Speaker 1:It's the culture of the organization. True story, yeah, absolutely. What are things outside of work that are passionate that help you? You know, maybe relax, or the work life balance, or you know, what do you do to channel your inner zen and oh, if only I had some inner zen to channel.
Speaker 2:I actually I'm a big fan of golf. I'm not good at it, I'm getting better at it. I'm a verb in golf. I can drive a golf cart yeah Well, that's a skill too. Everybody needs to know their superpower, right? I love golf, I love. I love it because it's kind of a strategic thing, but it's also a risk environment and I'm a bit of a verb in my group of golfers because I feel like you have to take some risks in life and in sport. And the Maggie shot is something where you weigh the odds and your probabilities and you just take the risk and go for it.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I'm wrong, sometimes I'm tragically wrong, but by and large it's a really really enjoyable pastime. It's good to hang out with my lady friends. I've got some incredibly strong. My network of support is also a bunch of golfers, so that's kind of exciting. So they are fantastic women golfers who take it seriously and also have a lot of fun. So that's that's probably what I do the most. I'm a constant traveler. I love, love, love traveling. I was really lucky in my work history to be able to travel a lot, so I still do it recreationally and I used to be called a competitive traveler. Calm down in my old age, but it's still pretty fun to get out and do things.
Speaker 1:I used to be a road warrior as well, before children and travel every week across the country for three plus years.
Speaker 2:And yeah, that's its moments for sure, and you do miss it when it's done right, so it's kind of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you get itchy even. You know working for Divergent and I don't have like a flight booked right now and you're kind of like get itchy, like I need to like you know my ride's going to be.
Speaker 2:That's true, that's very true. Yeah, it's really exciting actually. Yeah, it's been, it's been fun. I love traveling, I love golf. Those are probably the two things that kind of keep me grounded. I have a really strong network of friends and family and luckily my friends and family are all over the world, so no matter where I go, I feel like I've got somebody I can come to. I do it's fantastic.
Speaker 1:What's your favorite place that you've traveled? That maybe not.
Speaker 2:That's such a crazy question. I know it's funny because I'll answer that with a country and then I'll go no, it's this one, and I'll give you a list of 15 countries. But you know, there's just. I think there's probably something interesting about every continent that I've ever been on. There's beautiful. I love different cultures, bit of a foodie, bit of a whino, so those are kind of passions of mine as well. So I love Asia for that, from the beauty and simplicity of their world and how incredible their cultures are. I love Latin America. It's so exciting and fiery and beautiful, exciting to hang out there. And Europe is just like. There's just. I guess if I thought of one might be a toss up between Vietnam and Portugal and Argentina.
Speaker 1:Portugal's on my list to like go like high on the list to take the family.
Speaker 2:Do it.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Where's one place that you haven't been yet, that you're like, like you have to go. Hmm, put you on the spot. I know I am.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh yeah.
Speaker 1:This wasn't in the list of questions.
Speaker 2:I haven't. I haven't been to the stands yet, to where the stands. Okay, kazakhstan, afghanistan. Yep, the stands Kazakhstan. Maybe I'll have to do that before I hang up my passport. Hang on there.
Speaker 1:I don't. Doesn't sound like you're ever going to hang up your passport.
Speaker 2:Probably not, that's okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I always end with one last question Just wondering could you choose what your superpower is, that you shed light on over the world and help everyone out with?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know what's funny? I think I actually have many, and that's not braggadocious, it's just. I think a lot of entrepreneurs do. I think you're one wise soul told me once that my superpower is forgetting that I have a million superpowers that I engage every day, which made me giggle. But I think my real superpower is that I connect dots exceptionally well. I think that's what made me thrive in the recruitment space is understand like it's just a. It's just a thing that drives me every darn day to ensure that I can connect dots efficiently and effectively. I'm super lucky to be working in a space that allows me to do that and feeds my superpower. So I'm a consummate dot connector Awesome.
Speaker 1:Great, that was so great to talk to you today. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time. You're welcome.
Speaker 3:Thanks for tuning into the Verge podcast brought to you by Divergent, a leading healthcare IT consulting firm. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to hit the follow button to stay up to date with the latest IT developments and the exciting ways tech is transforming healthcare today.