.jpg)
Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Women Leaders in Payments: Sheffali Welch, Chief Operating Officer at The Clearing House | Episode 409
Discover the evolution of leadership in the payments industry through the lens of someone who's lived it. Sheffali Welsh, Chief Operating Officer of The Clearing House, brings a unique perspective shaped by her unconventional journey from cognitive science studies to overseeing operations for America's only private payment network operator.
The payments landscape demands a special kind of leadership – one that balances innovation with stability, risk-taking with prudence, and technical expertise with people-centered approaches. Sheffali articulates how leadership in financial services has transformed from the hierarchical, top-down model of decades past to today's collaborative, empowering style that connects employees to purpose and embraces flexibility. Her experiences navigating the 2008 financial crisis as chief of staff to Citigroup's global CFO provided invaluable lessons about leadership during turbulence that continue to shape her approach today.
What sets great leaders apart? According to Sheffali, it's "grit" – that powerful combination of passion and perseverance particularly evident in women who've had to play the long game in their careers. She makes a compelling case for how this quality is perfectly suited to the payments industry, where innovations like real-time payments require both visionary thinking and patient execution.
Her insights on the distinction between mentorship and sponsorship illuminate why women still need more advocates who will speak up for them when they're not in the room. Looking ahead, she's watching the emerging digital assets and stablecoin landscape as payments' next frontier.
Listen now and discover why playing the long game through strategic lateral moves might be your best career strategy in the dynamic world of payments.
Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast, where we talk to C-level leaders from across the payments landscape. We'll be discussing the products and services that impact the payment space today, as well as trends and predictions for the future of payments. We will also hear stories from our guests about their journeys to the top.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast. I'm your host, greg Myers, and this episode is part of our Women Leaders in Payments month, something we do every year in the month of July, and it's one of my favorite times of the year. This year's theme is redefining leadership, influence, impact and innovation. So those are some of the things you're going to be hearing about during the month of July. So first, a special thank you to our sponsors. Our title sponsor is WorldPay, our participating sponsors are VisiPay and Payrock, and our episode sponsors are the Clearinghouse and Genico and PaySafe. So special thanks to those companies. Today we have a very special guest, shefali Welsh, the Chief Operating Officer of the Clearinghouse. So, shefali, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Greg, thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here today.
Speaker 2:Great, so let's start off with a little icebreaker. So if you could have dinner with any woman in history, past or present, who would that be and why and what restaurant would you take them to?
Speaker 3:Ooh, that's a good one. So any female leader. I would have dinner with Eleanor Roosevelt, and I love Eleanor Roosevelt. She is a woman who was ahead of her time. She broke the mold. She broke gender norms and stereotypes. She was a fierce advocate for social justice and human rights and civil rights, which are things that are very near and dear to me as well. So that would be my choice. I would take her out for Indian food, and the reason is I am half Indian, half British, so I'm Indian by descent and I love Indian food, and I think, with Eleanor Roosevelt, it would be just very fun to see her, you know, learn to eat with her hands, teach her about a new food, and I would like to think that she would have been open-minded to something new and different from a food perspective. So that would be my dinner.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's awesome, the great way to get started. So let's talk a little bit about your background and your career. So, if you don't mind, give us a snapshot of your background, kind of maybe where you grew up, what you studied, what led you into payments.
Speaker 3:So I had kind of a roundabout journey to end up getting into payments. But I grew up way upstate New York, in Rochester. My parents moved when I was in high school to Westport, connecticut, so that was my first real introduction to New York City. I lived about an hour outside of New York City. I went to college in the Midwest, so moved around. From spending a lot of my life in the Northeast, moving to the Midwest was moved around. From spending a lot of my life in the Northeast, moving to the Midwest was in Chicago for college, and in college I studied cognitive science, which is the science of thought and reasoning, and so it's how people think, how people solve problems, how they approach questions, how they categorize things in their brain. So it's all that thinking, how they categorize things in their brain. So it's all that thinking, rational thinking, irrational thinking, very much studied behavioral economics as well, which was at that time very much considered part of cognitive science. And I came out of college and I actually first went into advertising and thinking more around like research, focus groups, what makes people make decisions, and I didn't find it very exciting. And so I transitioned to financial services where I went to GE Capital and I worked in there. Well, I was given a space in their management development program and what I loved about that is I had the opportunity to do lots of different things. So it was a rotational program where I actually started in marketing and communications but moved in different areas of the business. So it was a rotational program where I actually started in marketing and communications but moved in different areas of the business, and that was my launch of financial services, but on a very broad basis and so fast forward.
Speaker 3:I went back to graduate school at one point because I realized I very much looked at processes but I wasn't as tuned into the financials like the hardcore financial work, because I used to work in M&A, at GE, and my territory was everything outside of North America. So I traveled internationally three weeks a month and was looking at how companies operated, but I wasn't on the financial side. So I went back to school and then ended up working for large banks. So I was at Citi for a long period of time. Then from Citi I went to Deutsche Bank for a long period of time, then I was at Bank of New York, mellon, and then I moved to the clearinghouse where I am today, and along that way, I have worked in almost every area of financial services you can imagine. So I've worked in the consumer side, I've worked in corporate M&A, I've worked in sales and trading and I've, of course, worked in transaction banking and payments.
Speaker 3:So when I was at Deutsche, I was hired in initially running client strategy and sales and trading, and after being there about four years, an opportunity came up to be the chief operating officer of the Global Transaction Bank of the Americas division, and it was a new business area to me. And the transaction bank comprised cash management and payments, but also trade finance and supplier chain finance and the corporate trust business and other broader areas in transaction and wholesale banking, and that was eye-opening. What I loved about it was how tangible it was. So when you are working in payments and transaction banking, you are truly driving the economy.
Speaker 3:It's you know, payments impacts all of us, greg, as you know so well. So everybody from a day-to-day to large companies, and I love that transition to something so tangible. And it was actually where I met David Watson, the CEO of the transaction bank excuse me, of the Clearinghouse as well and so spent some time in payments. I actually ended up going back into private banking for a little bit and then fast forward. Let's say we'll skip a little bit. David called me up about coming over to the Clearinghouse and I was just thrilled to be here.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So thanks for that background. I appreciate it. So another kind of fun question let's say you're at a conference and you're asked to come up and speak and you have a hype song. What would that hype song be and why?
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, that hype song would be Happy by Pharrell Williams. I love it. I am a happy person. I love what I do today. I'm thrilled with my job. I live in Brooklyn, which is an amazing place. I have two wonderful teenagers and a husband and a puppy, so I think Happy would be my hype song, and it's just such a fun song to come out to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's a great answer. So far, I've done many of these interviews for the month and no one has picked the same song yet, so I think that's kind of cool. Okay, shivali, if you don't mind, tell us about your role at the Clearinghouse and maybe what excites you the most on sort of a day-to-day business and what you're working on.
Speaker 3:So my role as Chief Operating Officer is running the internal workings of the Clearinghouse. So in the Chief Operating Office is human resources, finance, corporate real estate, government relations, marketing and communications, and business analytics and insight. So it's a broad role. And what's very exciting about what I do is it's not the same role on any two days in a row and I love the ability to work on and do different things that really help drive the company. And what I love about the Clearinghouse is we are this unique mix of a purpose-driven company in financial services. So I've worked for global banks.
Speaker 3:You know my entire career practically and in my personal life I do a lot of advocacy and purpose-driven work, and what I love about where I work now is I get to bring both of those together.
Speaker 3:So I work with really smart, driven people who are subject matter experts and we all have so much pride in what we do and we take our purpose very seriously of driving safe, reliable and efficient payments architecture for the US economy and the clearinghouse.
Speaker 3:As you know, we are over 170 years old. We are the only private payment network operator in the country. We clear and settle more than $2 trillion a day through WIRE, which is our chips network, ACH, which is our EPN network, check image and now real-time payments as well through the RTP network. And, in fact, rtp was launched in 2017, which was really the first new payment rail in 40 years, and I think that's such a great highlight of our role at the Clearinghouse, which is also fostering innovation across the whole industry. We are the place where multiple banks, industry experts come together to determine how do we not only run safe architecture, but how do we actually think about what is coming in the payments landscape. So I love being here. I've been with the Clearinghouse almost two years, not quite and every day I learn something new. Every day I get to work on how we make the company a better place, and every day I have so much pride to come to work and be a part of this.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. So let's talk a little bit about leadership and maybe some lessons learned. So you know leadership is changing quickly, and how would you define modern leadership and how do you sort of embody that every day?
Speaker 3:on leadership that have never changed and I'll get to those in a minute. If you think about when I started my career, you know the leadership, especially in banking, was very centralized. It was very authoritative, very hierarchical and top-down. And now fast forward to where we are now and leadership is very collaboration-based. It's being a collaborator and inviting collaboration. It's very much around tenets of empowerment.
Speaker 3:How do you empower your employees to make decisions that are appropriate within where they are, to really take leadership and ownership Very much? How do you inspire and support your workforce? How do you connect them to a sense of purpose of the company workforce? How do you connect them to a sense of purpose of the company, as I just spoke about a moment ago? And so that evolution that we've gone through over the past couple decades, I would say, is it's eye-opening and I think it's where we should have been all along and we're probably good leaders have been all along that ability to inspire the employees underneath them, been all along that ability to inspire the employees underneath them. I also think a really big shift now we've seen, as we know in the past three to four years, has been a hybrid workforce and this sense of employee flexibility and, I think, really pulling in that empowerment element, which is you can deliver the on what is not exactly a traditional schedule. You can deliver without sitting right outside your boss's office. You can inspire your teams without their being right next to you. And it's also now brought up a whole view on what are the unconscious biases that we have in industry and as leaders. How do we push through those and pass those? So I think the shift has become much more people-oriented and much more employee-oriented versus employer or manager-oriented. I think it is having leaders that are not just more empathetic I think that's a word we hear a lot and I truly think that's true but just more understanding of the ebbs and flows of real life.
Speaker 3:And I think you know, I think back to when before I had my children, I guess, and when I was sort of pregnant with my first. It was this idea of, like, you hide it as long as possible, you don't tell anybody, because it would be viewed negatively, and I would challenge almost anybody to think that today, right now, we celebrate it. We celebrate it's a milestone in a person's life that's very big to them and it doesn't change how they're going to show up at work and perform. It doesn't change their career aspirations, it just means there's a wonderful life event that they should be welcome to sharing with everybody.
Speaker 3:So I think this change in leadership will also make very much a change in employees and staff why they come to work, why they stay with a company for a long period of time Again, what's the purpose they connect to. And, in fact, one more thing I'll say on this at the Clearinghouse, we actually launched this year a leadership training for our entire people management workforce, so every manager in the company has the opportunity to go through a training that focuses on three core modules of connect, coach and create an inclusive environment, and it's really built on the principles of modern leadership. These are the things to lead a workforce today to have employees who want to come to work, to have employees who want to stay with a company and stay in groups, or even have internal mobility opportunities for a long time to come.
Speaker 2:Okay, is there a decision or maybe a moment in your career where you look back on it and you see that it was a really defining moment? I like to call them like aha moments, but did you have any of those in your career?
Speaker 3:I think I did and I think I had two, but one leads to the other. So when I worked at Citi, I worked there through the financial crisis and I was the chief of staff to the global CFO, so I saw everything happening in real time and I truly learned leadership through a crisis environment, which was very different from leadership in a normal environment, and I had a phenomenal boss who I really learned that from sort of a front row seat in the financial crisis and through that role I knew everybody in the company. Right, Financial crisis, Citi was the largest bank on the street. For anybody who lived that they can empathize with what we probably went through. So, working directly for the CFO, if there was a question and I needed an answer anywhere in the company, I could get it. So I was very entrenched and for me, what was very the big point there was going through a true crisis situation and how you put so many things in perspective and, again, how you make decisions and how that changes in a crisis. So then during that time I used to also do a lot of reading and research into what were some of the differences between women's careers and men's careers. It was still very much a time where men seemed to move a lot faster in their careers and one of the core pieces of research was women tended not to take risks in their career that men would take, risks that would truly change the trajectory of their career, and women tended to play it a lot safer.
Speaker 3:So what came along then was an offer from Deutsche Bank, and the offer from Deutsche was to really start a whole new group in the company working in sales and trading, and it was around client strategy and an approach to client strategy, and I had done similar kind of work at Citi and yet I had such a strong network at Citi. I had actually moved on to another role, running strategy for the private bank there and I thought, well, if I'm not going to listen to the research that I'm reading, I'll say about taking risks in your career, then why am I bothering to do this research? So moving to Deutsche was a big risk. I knew everybody at Citi. I had been there quite a long time, I had a very strong network I worked for and with some of the most senior people in the company To moving to do something, setting it up completely differently. I could set it up how I thought it should be run. It would be a true culture change on that end of the company. And so I left. I took the risk, I went over and I love it, because I was in that role for four years running client strategy for debt sales and trading and we really changed how we looked at clients and it was a true culture change.
Speaker 3:And what I joke about is when I went, salespeople would say you're not going to tell me anything about my client that I don't know. And you know what you're doing. I don't believe in. It's just another you know flash in the pan, incentive or program that senior management wants to like.
Speaker 3:A couple of years later, a salesperson coming over to my desk and saying, chef, I've got a meeting in Chicago in two days. What do I need to know about the client? What's my competitive positioning, what's the opportunity I need to be going after? And I love that because it gives me that perspective of some patience and time. If you believe in what you're doing, you have the right marketing pitch, you measure it appropriately, you can bring people along that journey with you and you can achieve that cultural change. So the aha moment for me there was not only pay attention to the research and take the risk in your career. This is a risk, but could truly change the trajectory, which it did, but also just being able to achieve that cultural change after a period of about two to three years and it took that much time, but we performed so much better and we really had a much more strategic approach to our clients after that so much better, and we really had a much more strategic approach to our clients after that.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, what do you think is something that female leaders can bring to the table?
Speaker 3:that our industry needs more of. Female leaders bring a lot of grit. Now, what do we mean by grit? There's been, there are books on it. A woman named Angela Duckworth wrote a whole book on grit and it is really the ability to stick with something despite challenges, just persevere and bring sort of courage and determination to a situation. Angela Duckworth described it as this combination of passion and perseverance.
Speaker 3:I think women bring a lot of grit to leadership because, especially sort of my generation, we had to play the long game. We had to play the long game of getting that seat at the table and having a voice, and I think in payments, payments is a long game. As we talked about earlier, right ACH was developed in the early 70s. We didn't introduce a new rail until 2017. We need to make sure that we're always providing for safety and reliability and soundness in the financial system. So it's a long game and I think women bring a lot of grit to the table. They bring a lot of grit and leadership and I think, when we think about payments in particular, that long game is really important that ability to have passion and to persevere despite challenges and obstacles you might face along the way. So that's what I think women bring to the table.
Speaker 2:That's great. That's great. If I was in my office, I could reach back and pull that book up, because I've actually read that book. So that's a great example. Well, let's shift gears and talk a little bit about innovation and influence. So, as you know, the payments industry is changing very fast. It has in the last 10, 15 years. So how do you stay innovative as a leader?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so part of it is listening to the team around me. Right, innovation, I think, is a team sport. We all might have great epiphanies in the shower in the morning, but nobody comes up with something new and brilliant innovative all by themselves. So, as I mentioned at the top, I have a really broad job, so I really listen to the people around me, to my team and then to others in the company and in the industry. I love to listen to podcasts such as yours, listen to our own Payments Nerds podcast, where I go to conferences hearing speakers talk about what they're thinking about and working on. So I love listening to folks around me. I think that's one of the biggest ways as a leader, you stay innovative.
Speaker 3:And then the different lens that I bring to the table is not being a 30-year subject matter expert in payments, but working in all different areas of banking and understanding how payments actually impacts different people. So when I worked in private banking, how does payments influence how people want to move their money around within their accounts? When I used to work in transaction banking at Deutsche, we used to talk about that flow of payments to a developer in another region of the world that's getting paid, you know, 99 cents every time you download a new app to your smartphone, and thinking about things from a different lens and different perspective is what I can bring to the table. And listening to the people around me who are experts within their own fields or within payments is how I continue to learn about what's changing and evolving in this industry. And then, of course, reading trades, or reading, you know, american Banker is a great source of new news and information and then talking with young people.
Speaker 3:So I have, you know, I have a niece and nephew who are in their 20s and actually live in another country, and my nephew is coming to visit. He lives in France and he was coming to visit and I was picking him up from the airport and his flight got in a little bit earlier and when I came to get him he had like a coffee and a bagel and I said, oh, did you have money? And he said, no, I like downloaded an app that could do some FX translation from my account in France and could bring the money over, and then I could just use that app to pay. You know, the Dunkin' Donuts in the airport and this is, by the way, a number of years ago, so he was maybe early twenties at the time. Now he's sort of mid to late twenties and it was when a lot of this you know what I just said.
Speaker 3:Now your listeners might say, well, of course that's how anyone would do it, but that wasn't how anyone was doing it back then. So it was very exciting, you know, to listen to him too. So I think younger people, the generation below me, is always a great way for me to get information and to think differently, which is what will spark innovation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that thought because I have a daughter who's 21 in college and she's very much the same way. I kind of pay attention to what she does from a payments capability and it's kind of that thing where we talk a lot about in this industry is the whole friction thing right. If there's any friction in anything she does, she just closes that down and goes to something else immediately, goes to something else immediately. So you know the same thing. You can learn so much from just kind of watching a different generation and how they do things. So kind of a good segue into the next question. So what's one kind of trend or change in the industry that you're really keeping up with right now?
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh, one is hard to talk about, but I will follow the assignment. Follow the assignment. I've talked about real-time payments. I think the potential for how we leverage a real-time payments rail is you know, we haven't even scratched the surface. So, through real-time payments, people can move money between their own accounts instantly. So think about wanting to fund a brokerage account to take advantage of markets. I also am a big believer in real-time payments helping on a broad scale from financial inclusion. Now we haven't reached that yet, but in the old days of things like payday lending was because people couldn't get their money when they needed it and so they needed a bridge. Well, real-time payments is going to help us provide that bridge for people to be able to access their money instantly. We're already seeing what it's doing in instant wage access and the gig economy. You know an Uber driver being able to get his or her payments from the day on that day, enabling people to really fund their day-to-day invest in their dreams because they have their money instantly. I think that there's a world of flexibility that real-time payments is going to provide.
Speaker 3:You think about we're just talking about the generation below. They are used to things when they want it. You know how they want it. So my daughter, who's 13, still doesn't fully understand the concept that when I turn on the radio, I can't just switch the song, and so she's always plugging her phone into the car because she wants to listen to what song she wants to listen to, whereas I'm perfectly happy with my generation of putting on the radio and whatever song comes on, the song comes on. You know, I'll listen to a genre, but I'm not programming the exact song that comes up next.
Speaker 3:Well, real-time payments is sort of going to give us a similar thing. Right, it's when do you need a payment, you know? Do I need it now? Do I need to schedule it a couple days from now? How do I get paid? I think that that's going to open up just a whole new world of possibility on how people get paid, how people think about payments.
Speaker 3:So I am constantly thinking about what are the new use cases that we have for real-time payments, and that's where the clearinghouse really is just ahead. As much as we launched the rail in 2017, it is really starting to gain steam, as we're seeing now, and we're not only thinking about what I've mentioned already, but real estate transactions. So the real-time payments network increased the size of the transaction limit up to $10 million in February, so that actually opens up a whole new world of types of transactions you can actually do in real time. If you can move that much more money, you can think about real estate transactions, you can think about private banking and where you have ultra wealthy people wanting to move money between their accounts. So it's constantly evolving what we can do on a real time basis, not just the use cases, but now the types of payments people might be wanting to make. So that's the big trend I think about.
Speaker 3:Of course, the other one I'll mention because I think your listeners would find it strange if I don't is the whole move on digital assets and stablecoin, and that's a really stay tuned right. That's going to be the next real frontier, I think, in payments. We are seeing this administration put some kind of legislation and we've seen executive orders come out, so that's really accelerating, and I've listened to many podcasts and people that you have interviewed who are really playing in this space. So that's another really innovative, interesting area that's evolving still.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's funny you bring that up because I was just thinking earlier. It's like the conversations had always had AI in them. The last month or two, three, maybe stable coins has come up more and more and more, so it just feels like that's the next big thing, but everybody's still trying to kind of figure out what does it mean and how do I use it in the payments and banking world. So, like you said, stay tuned. A lot more to come on that. So how do you think women leaders can influence the future direction of payments?
Speaker 3:So I think some of it is, as I mentioned earlier, with bringing that long-term view and that perseverance. I think it's something through my career I've seen women do a very good job at. I also think we are still traditionally in an area where women are underbanked relative to men quite often, and so if we think about payments as a connector, it connects people. Really. Listening to women as to what they need is, I think, going to continue to open up new areas of the market and the network. And again, I just think that leadership aspect of looking at things from a different perspective and having that passion and perseverance for the long term is going to help influence where we go as an industry having that long-term view, having a view to what are the different use cases that we can bring to the table.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about mentorship and impact. So, have you had mentors in your career? Who were they? How did you get those mentors and what kind of impact did they have on you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I've had, I think, of two key mentors in my career. One, as I alluded to earlier, was the global CFO of Citi when I worked for him during the financial crisis, and he was always calm. He always drove all of us to want to work harder. He had this brilliant ability to truly make you want to do better. It wasn't you were doing better for a paycheck or for a promotion or because you were told to. It was his truth. He helped really harness intrinsic motivation, and so that's something I've been working on throughout my career and I've never seen anyone do it as well as he does. But that really was eye-opening for me because through the financial crisis, really the house was burning. No matter what bank you worked in, the house was burning, and yet he could motivate people through a burning house to continue to want to do better, which I think often what you see in crises is the exact opposite. So that leadership through a crisis was very influential for me. And then the other was a woman who was the CEO of the Transaction Bank in the Americas when I worked at Deutsche Bank, and she's also always been very much a mentor to me and she was probably one of my first real sponsors, so a person who helped advocate for me when I wasn't in the room and helped suggest stretches in my career that maybe I wouldn't have thought of for myself, and I think that's something that more women need.
Speaker 3:We need true sponsorship. We don't need as much mentorship, I would argue. We are educated, we understand our strengths, weaknesses, coaching, things we need to work on, but we women still often need the person who's going to push them when they're not in the room, who's going to speak up for them, and I still think we don't find we don't find that as prevalently for women as we often do for men or younger men coming up in their careers. So that really taught me sponsorship and she's still because she's been an expert in payments and transaction banking. She's still a person I will talk to about the industry. She knows so many people. I'll often talk to her about people in talent. So it's just another real area, another person who I really go to a lot.
Speaker 2:Okay, so kind of follow on question. So you talk about sponsorship as opposed to mentorship. How do you suggest someone maybe a little bit younger in their career? How do they find that sponsor? Does that sponsor find them? Sort of? Maybe elaborate on that if you don't mind.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, I think you can't find it almost. So a sponsor has to be a person who knows you, who has worked with you directly and who truly encourages you to do your best and leads you. So there's a great leadership style called radical candor, and radical candor basically says that you need to challenge people directly and you need to care for them deeply as well. And what that means is you establish that relationship with an employee, that you truly care for them. That gives you that ability to challenge them. And so, if you think about it, if you challenge somebody who doesn't think you have any care for them, they just think you're kind of being a jerk. Somebody who doesn't think you have any care for them, they just think you're kind of being a jerk. And if you care for an employee but you don't really challenge them, then you're just sort of a wet noodle and not an effective manager.
Speaker 3:And radical candor is finding that balance where you truly look out for how an employee's career is going to go, how they're doing, you understand their personal motivations and then you can challenge them to help them improve and get better and help develop them.
Speaker 3:So I think what's really important is you need to find a sponsor who actually balances these two sides, a person who understands you and takes that time which is very important but who's willing to challenge you, because how do you get better if nobody's willing to challenge you or develop you?
Speaker 3:And then that person is really going to be the person who is sponsoring you in the background, because by showing these two traits they will help convey to others. Here are the things that person is really good at. Here are the things that drive that person and what they'll take back to that person are. Here are some of the perceptions. Here are some of the things that you need to work on to really achieve that next level. So I would encourage people, when they are trying to find their mentor or sponsor is, think about who has invested the time into them, invested that time to understand what makes them tick and then invested that time to truly give them honest feedback on how they get better, because those are the people who have an interest in your development and your getting better.
Speaker 2:Okay, great Now. Thanks for sharing that. That's awesome. So if you have someone just entering payments female looking at building a career in payments what one piece of advice would you give them?
Speaker 3:I always think, play the long game. And what I mean by that is when you go throughout your career. There are points to move up and there are points to move laterally. And I think people who don't play the long game are always looking at the up how do I do the next thing, how do I get the next promotion? And they're not thinking how do I develop depth in certain areas? How do I develop that skill? How do I take jobs that move sideways, that truly move laterally? They're going to expand my thinking, broaden my network. So I tell people play the long game. Now you need to know when to advocate for yourself.
Speaker 3:I've had points in my career where I have taken a move and somebody said, oh, but that's lateral. And I've been very clear where it's not and where that needs to put me in line for a promotion or put me in line for something new. But I've taken tons of lateral moves in my career for something new. But I've taken tons of lateral moves in my career which have enabled me to understand a breadth of banking, a breadth of different functional areas, which brings me back to the top of our podcast, which is, you know, as chief operating officer, I have a very broad role. But I can take on that broad role because I've worked in different areas of banking or have taken the time to understand how they impact each other, how you influence the movement of the bigger business.
Speaker 3:So I always encourage people don't always go to the next shiny thing. Think about where you actually want to stay put for a period of time, and that period of time might be three, four, five, six years longer. It's been a shift for me, mentally too, in that you know the younger generation jumps the job hop a lot faster. So I have shifted to understanding that that is. It's a different outlook to how you manage your career. But I think it's also where I've developed at some of the advice I give to younger people of playing the long game is going to pay off, I think, in the longer run as well. But again, know when to advocate to move up and know when it makes a good, when there's a good opportunity to move sideways, and don't necessarily fight to always move up, because what you're going to gain from those lateral moves is equally important.
Speaker 2:Okay, I think that's great advice. So let's wrap up with one final kind of fun question. So when you look at your phone, what is one non-business app that you use the most, and what does that say about you?
Speaker 3:So I was thinking about this and trying to analyze in my own phone usage and I think this might sound boring. There's two, but I'll talk about one, which is Google Maps. So I have always loved maps and I'm the generation that grew up with an Atlas in the car, looking at maps on paper, and I still love doing that. I just do it in digital form. So I've you know, I've lived in my neighborhood in Brooklyn for 12 years. I just do it in digital form. So I've lived in my neighborhood in Brooklyn for 12 years. I've lived in and out of New York City for 30 years, practically.
Speaker 3:At this point, I still love pulling up my map because it does two things. One gives me certainty as to where I need to go, and so it clears up my headspace to think about other things. But also, what I love with digital maps now is they show you so many things in the neighborhood you never thought of. So we talked about innovation earlier. Part of innovation is just being open to new things and new experiences and, funnily enough, when I pull up maps, it'll show me restaurants I didn't know. It'll show me shops I didn't know and things in the neighborhood, so it could be a neighborhood I'm familiar with, but I'm going to see new stores, especially living in New York City.
Speaker 3:Things roll over all the time. So I tend to look at Google Maps a lot, to the point that it's a joke with my husband of you really don't need to pull up a map, don't? You know where you're going by now, and I just think but it's so much fun to just look and see what's new in the area or to not have to worry that I am going in the wrong direction. So I hope that on one hand, it says, even though I'm a little bit old fashioned and rooted in certain things, like enjoying looking at a map, I am also always thinking forward to what are the new things I'm going to learn and it's going to teach me every day.
Speaker 2:So, that's awesome. I love it. I love it. So, before we go, I want to give you the chance to see if there's anything else you'd like to add before we wrap up the show.
Speaker 3:You know I want to go back on one thing when we talked about leadership and that move to much more people-centered leadership. One of the things I loved about coming to the Clearinghouse is it is really giving me the opportunity to change the culture of the company to be much more people-centered. So I've talked about the learning and development that we're rolling out to all of our people managers. We've also rolled out learning and development to all of our employees. We also recently launched a whole new set of parental leave benefits to give better benefits to our employees who are having a child, whose significant other is having a child, who are adopting a child, who are fostering a child, really opening up what that means to be a parent.
Speaker 3:We've opened up so much more around wellness and I just think I didn't have the opportunity to mention it earlier, but I really think it brings together so much of what we've talked about in how leadership is changing, how culturally it's really exciting to change cultures in a company and how you can drive that culture and how that takes time, but the steps you can do, how much fun it is to work at the Clearinghouse, where we are really trying to be people-centered, and then how we're thinking about that next generation down, of what's important to them, what are the opportunities that their companies that drive them and I love being in a position where my job is getting to think about those kinds of things how do I make the clearinghouse the best place it can be and the best place to work for all of our employees? So I didn't get a chance to mention that earlier and I just wanted to bring that together.
Speaker 2:Great, great. I think that's a great way to wrap up the show. So, shefali, thank you so much for being here. I know your time is very valuable, so I really, really do appreciate you being on the show today.
Speaker 3:Great. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun.
Speaker 2:Great, and to all your listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us this week on the Leaders in Payments podcast. Make sure you visit our website at leadersinpaymentscom, where you can subscribe to the show and where you'll find our show notes. If you enjoyed listening, please share on your social channels as well.