Hey. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Sheetal Rishi, and I am part of our company called Stripe. I lead the strategy and transformation for enterprise customers.It's absolutely wonderful to be here, in one of my favorite, women in tech, sessions, essentially, and the community and the networking opportunities. And I hope everybody who's listening in and all the great sessions that have happened already before me and the ones that will come after, after, everyone has a great experience being part of this absolutely phenomenal movement, that's been powered by the women in tech community.

So, the topic that I wanted to talk to you all about today is a fintech operating model. And before we, you know, really dive into this, just wanna share my own personal story, my personal journey in this industry for the last almost two decades now. It over the over the years, you know, I mean, I've seen the rules of business continue to evolve sometimes gradually, sometimes overnight as fast as, you know, things flip because of either technological advances or through changes in compliance or through some macro factors, you know, political changes and whatnot.

So nothing, in the sense, is really constant. It's everything has been changing, and I've lived through the era of seventy seventy seventy. And some of you may have heard about it where, Jack Welch from GE had come out with this term, which essentially meant that 70% of the processes can be standardized. Out of that 70% of any business function that's standardized, the other 70% could be outsourced to a third party vendor that specializes in those specific functions. And then out of those, 70% would be offshored, you know, usually to to India, because of the quality of skills and the low cost, labor cost essentially that the country provided back in those days. And then came the next era, which I like to call as the rise of AI, artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, whatever you wanna call it, where it was all about how can we use the technology to make more efficient processes and not just efficient from a process perspective but make them also intelligent processes.

And now the era that I think we are in right now, which I like to call as the platform era, is is the place where we are actually, creating scale by enabling others. So think of Airbnb or an Uber or a Lyft. Right? The places are actually empowering others, enabling others by creating a platform where the others could take benefit and creating that big giant ecosystem of both providers and consumers, either of that software or a service or a product. Could be literally anything right now. You know, health health care, it could be, technology, networking. It could be selling a product, etcetera. And all of that is getting powered through through the platform. So what has stayed constant in all these three eras? Essentially, the change. Right? Change is only constant and It's important for the leadership that has to remain consistently adaptive to this new technology as well. And you you got to lead.

And why I think this topic is relevant to women in tech personally is because I I think as women, we've always constantly in our respective, businesses, have always led in a personal life as well. We've always had to adapt, and we've led the adaptation with a formal authority. We've created, you know, order out of chaos as I as I like to say it with with with the with the with the most important muscle of creating an empathy, being resilient to all the kind of changes that comes in and being very, very clear, providing the clarity that's required as as we build.

And I think, personally, to me, those are the intrinsic skills that are required for anyone who's looking to really transform change, build a new, operating model for the fintechs in this new world of platform, era where everything needs to connect and change. And before I dive into what my learnings have been in this space, I just want to take a few minutes to talk about what really I mean by fintech operating model because, again, different people could have different meanings or interpretations of, what is really fintech and what do you mean by operating model.

So to so to me, fintech operating model is not just about use of new technologies or, again, software or hardware or new process. But I think it's a combination of people change, processes change, and platforms itself, technology itself that needs to be updated from, delivering financial services. So when I say financial services, what I mean by is either it could be payments or, processing the billing function. You know, how do people get paid? At the end of the day, it's very simple. Anything that's around making sure that the service or the product that you are selling is is being paid for, and then the people who are providing those services get paid. And in the process, the platform provider or the company that's providing these or facilitating this business is able to do their own reporting, their own intel reconciliation, being making sure that they're you're compliant.

So delivering these financial services, I think, require both, three three traits of trust so that people who are actually doing the transactions, can trust the platform that they will be paid, and we are not involved in any kind of, money laundering kind of activities. Right? Especially across the globe or you provide the service and you will get you will not be paid. Speed is very critical as well because this is not something when you deliver something you're expecting that you get paid for it at speed. And then the third is scale. With this whole global globalization happening, everything needs to be delivered at scale. You know, more you could be working from wherever in the part of this beautiful earth, but the services or product is are not restricted to the specific ZIP code that you live in. And the third piece is, as you talk about think about operating model is that you must stay compliant. There may be new payment methods that are coming in.

You know, maybe Bitcoin becomes or stablecoins are becoming the new sources of payments that you can use. But at the end of the day, you have to make sure that you're evolving and you're compliant to the regulations both at the, the country level that you're operating out of and also where your consumers reside. Right? If you're some if you are processing, our transactions on behalf of your consumers that may be sitting in any other part of the world that you're not really stabilized in in. You have to be able to be compliant to those regulations as well. So with that, you know, what is that the definition, that common understanding of the fintech operating model itself, I wanna talk about what kind of phases you know, what's the efficiency phase that is I'm seeing.

So as I began, you know, talking from the seventy seventy seventy era, which is the outsourcing and offshoring era, I think the focus was more around how can you reduce the cost and how can you have a better labor arbitrage. Essentially, the biggest cost reduction was coming from the the lower, or cheaper labor if you could find in any part of the world. That's how it became. And the play was more about anything that you can standardize. You know, you can have some rules based system set up. You can centralize. You can offshore. And the examples classic examples that came along the journey were the shared services, the call center, customer contact services, the business process, like finance, HR, you know, technology, application development support that became good candidates for transfer supporting in this phase one.

Then the second phase is around which we are sort of living through right now, the AI led efficiency gain, where the goal is how can I do things cheaper, better, faster, do that speed, do them intelligently, and optimize them in the process? So it's not necessarily always about being low cost, but it's all about how do I optimize and make it more consumable across the board. So what kind of activities become good target for this is anything that can be done, by application of very standard rules that can be taught to a machine. Right? For example, in lending or fraud, you know, if you we can set up rules of engagement saying if there is a particular indicator of a fraudulent activity, then don't process a transaction. So wherever you can put those rules, those are pretty typically good candidates for an AI led efficiency transformation play. And then the third phase, which is what we are living in right now, is all about scale, the platform ecosystem.

The more number of people you can bring in onto your platform, the faster you can grow and be able to serve and expand your business. So the play here is that we must be able to provide modular services because not everything will be required by everyone. So you could provide services that are relevant to your partners or you can cocreate with the partners on the platform. So, again, classic examples, companies like Stripe, where I am right now, Shopify, Airbnb, Plaid. I think they're all classic examples of all of these. And, again, bringing back in context of women in tech, you know, I find these things very fascinating because as women, we've always lived and thought through this way. Right? We build ecosystem. We foster ecosystems where different kind of people can come together. And we've been really operating like a platform in a real life. We're connecting. We're enabling.

We're empowering. Long before, I think it was actually, it's become a buzzword now, but I feel like women will be doing this already. You know? So and why do I think women are, again, platform thinkers if I have to think about it? You know, we've created those systems slash families that have scale, again, across geos, across multiple generations. We've built networks of what I like to call as influence. And thirdly is it's not just about one person or one, group of people. It's been about enabling communities, enabling others to thrive. So I think these intrinsic capabilities that come inside are very relevant to the business as well that we're operating in right now. So from what is you what is it that I look for when I'm I'm looking to refine what an operating model will look like?

I think there are three big things that I wanna share with you all. So one is you're designing for change. It's not a monolithic solution that you're building. It's very rigid. It's very inflexible, in elastic, unelastic. We need to do everything opposite of that. So design for change because things will continue to change. They will continue to, become better as the technology is advancing, mostly led by technological advances and I think driven by consumer needs in the world we live in. So the change what you're designing must be a modeler, easy to plug and play and move things around, and it is really that's the only way you can really future ready your models that you're building. Compliance is very core for me. Everything that I look at, I make sure that, you know, I'm aware of the process that will influence what I'm doing, how I'm processing, who I'm bringing to the table for processing those changes.

So very, very critical to be mindful of designing for change. The second bit is drive engagement. I mean, you cannot I think the importance of design the best example for me personally is Apple. The way it was designed was that automatically the engagement the usage of the mobile devices become a second nature. You don't really have to make it clunky, very hard to figure out, to do what, where, very easy to see. You know? So keep people the users in in your mind. It has to be people first implementation. And I am a big, huge fan of, you know, not waiting for everything to be cooked. I would rather take steps.

So I love the idea of being agile, so have iterative rollouts. And in the rollout process, identify the people, again, back to the people part of the house who are who can be your champion, right, and help evolve and scale the solution you have built. So from network perspective, who are your people who will help you drive engagement or whatever you are building, whatever is key to your operating model. And then finally, measure that matters. It's very, very important. Keep your metrics in place. Do not make them very generic or do not have too many less is more. Build your KPIs. Personally, I really am big fan of cost, speed, and net promoter scores. Again, net promoter scores indicating both that I have an engagement, and I also have some kind of, goal post for myself to make sure my NPS I'm always excelling the customer or my user feedback or what they're using build as I build this platform.

So aligned with the KPIs, again, you don't want to be burning, a lot of your cash, a lot of your money. So make sure that the cost is always in check. And, again, with speed is important. You don't want to build something long after the need has disappeared or the world has moved, but you're still in the building phase. So the KPIs around cost, speed, NPS, I think are a good, measurement met tactic to have. And then finally, translate your ambition into action. And what I what I mean by that is that you can have lot of ideas. Right? We can we can we can we but we make sure that whatever you are building is one very clear, can be clearly understood by the people who are around your part of your journey as well, and then be be able to convert those into actionable outcomes.

So one one step at a time, not a big giant, building. It it's good to have big goals, moonshot projects, but I think unless you have a plan that breaks down how you're going to achieve those moonshot projects and during the journey you are, you know, you are flexible and agile, I think really defeats the purpose of being able to convert that ambition into action.

So if we were to summarize, you know, what is the platform thinking? And and and I think the platform thinking is to drive the platform and this new operating model, your leadership thinking is same as whatever you're building for your platform. Now as a leader, what we should be cognizant of is that we are driving enablement, and enablement is much, much more important or it leads to ownership. The more people are enabled on using whatever technology that is or whatever change you're making, I think you'll have more owners in the system. And once people own it, it's very, very easy to adopt it and be be be a part of this, of this transformation themselves. And then the second piece is around architecting ecosystems. Again, this is that world we live in right now. The technology should enable us.

So we're creating ecosystems around it, and people should be able to use our technology in the most useful way that benefits not only us as providers of the operating model, but also, benefit from what their goals, aspirations, business desires are essentially. And then third, unlike back in the days, you know, it was more about control and ensuring that everybody can only do so many things and does not necessarily have transparency and visibility. I think what we're designing for now is more around, moving away from the control tactics, but more about orchestration. So in orchestration, you know you know, who consumes what, those roles would still be relevant. But if based on the role that I'm in, if I need some flexibility to orchestrate a certain behavior, either in adding a new product or adding a new way of, billing my customer, for example, from a fintech perspective, I think will will become very, very critical. So build what you are from from from as you think through this, you know, should be very adapt adaptive, you know, and stay very outcome focused and think think from a from a from a platform perspective.

So if I were to, you know, sum up, my my thinking and share with you my my biggest thing is we're not just building technology systems, but we're literally redesigning how leadership works in fintech. And fintech is not a new function that has just emerged over the last I think as long as businesses, as long as people have exchanged valued services among each other or product among each other, fintech is a age old phenomenon. But the way we are building systems around it, the way technology is empowering, the global outreach of what we are building requires, thinking around as you build the ecosystem that there is adaptability. So if you are in a different region, for example, you're able to adapt. You know? That that's the core thinking from a leadership perspective. When you're building the platform for the future, you should be. And for me personally, I think building that microservices and having an extensible platform is the key in this area.

And I think as as women, you know, if you're part of the audience, we do lead with scale and empathy in mind. Again, that to me is a second nature. So I think that is something put that skill of yours to use, as you help design or as you lead designing of these ecosystems or platforms in your in your areas of work. So if there were three things that I would recommend, you to take away from this presentation, I think my biggest notes would be around, you know, build, operating models that are adaptable. Don't try to force or have a bigger control on what you build, but build systems that companies, organizations, subdivisions across the globe when your businesses can adapt to them. Lead with engagement or hybrid option enablement sessions, training sessions are critical pieces.

But if there is not a two way street where people can actually test, leverage what you have built and be able to provide feedback or be able to give you any kind of, criticism as well to drive, adoption. I think that goes a really, really long way. Plus, it informs your road map. And always, when you engage with your users, the answer doesn't have to be always yes. We're gonna incorporate that change. But I think sometimes the answer could be also saying why you cannot incorporate that particular change. But either ways, I think the more you can engage, the more you can encourage people to come and talk to what you have built. I think the higher levels of adoption you will see because change again is is real change. It's the only real it is happening.

It must be a part of the change yourself. And then finally, you know, elaborate the platform thinking as as your edge. Again, this is something, I keep saying. We are more entrepreneurial. We more think of bigger ways than we really recognize sometimes from an ecosystem perspective. So as you build your own fintech operating model, you know, think platform and think that's something that you really would do even in your daily life as you build. How will you define modularity? How will you build microservices? How will you enable people? How will you ensure that people are engaging and providing feedback? That can then inform your own own road map. You know? So with with that, thank you for listening in. I am on LinkedIn. Sheetal Dishi, strategy and transformation leader at Stripe.

Feel free to join me, follow along, and, let's continue to have, have fun as we as we drive big impact and be part of this bigger technological change that we're all going through across the industry. Thank you for listening and enjoy the rest of the conference.