Women in fintech and banking assemble: the region now has its own meetup group

Wnet, which stands for Women’s Network in Electronic Transactions, was started a decade ago by three female executives who noticed that there were very few women in the payments industry, particularly at the executive level. They launched Wnet to serve as a forum for women to support each other in developing ideas, progressing professionally and even progressing in their personal lives, with the overall vision of driving parity for women in the industry.
Today, Wnet has evolved to be a national network comprised of local interest networking circles, which Wnet calls LINCs, across the nation. These networking events are open to anyone interested in or touched by payments. There is an Austin Women Driving Payments, Atlanta Women Driving Payments, and effective Sept. 21, 2016, an official Philadelphia Women Driving Payments! (Our focus is on Greater Philadelphia, including Delaware.)
In May 2016, I had attended a Wnet event in New York City during which Julie Pukas, TD Bank’s Head of U.S Cards and Merchant Solutions was a featured leader, who offered career insights to a room of individuals touched by the payments industry. The energy of the event resulted in us wanting to see whether a passion for payments thrived in our local community, namely the Philadelphia region. Julie suggested I lead that effort. I saw this as an opportunity to deepen our involvement with the community, enable members to broaden their network, to facilitate learnings and knowledge share from leaders and peers.
As such, I joined Wnet in June 2016 and helped launch the Philadelphia LINC with an inaugural event on Sept. 14, 2016 in Center City Philadelphia. For our first event, I asked Julie (hey, it’s only fair ☺) and Patricia Hasson, president of Clarifi, a nonprofit with locations across the Delaware Valley that provides lifelong financial literacy through counseling and education, to be our featured leaders. We focused the topic on managing innovation, change and your career. Having Patty and Julie as co-panelists offered perspective from both private and nonprofit leadership as well as the need to consider, understand and potentially educate consumers of new financial products. We had over 20 attendees, a few of whom volunteered to help organize our second event, planned for January 2017. While the core values of the group focus on women supporting each other, it’s important that everyone feels included.
Wnet also offers mentorship and educational programs to members. Find out more here.
Come out to our second event on Jan. 26, 2017 from noon to 1:30 p.m. A light lunch will be provided. It’s an event for anyone who is interested in driving and/or managing change, leadership and networking; particularly those touched by the payments ecosystem (credit card, mobile wallet, mobile payments, startups and established business owners).
The event will be at Hercules Plaza (1313 N. Market Street) in Wilmington and will focus on emerging payments and change management. Our esteemed panelists will be Celia Moncholi, head of community development at TD Bank and Dena Hamilton, general manager and director of enterprise fraud and security management at NCR Corporation. They will offer insights from both a community development and security management perspective.
We’ll have an event up on our meetup page soon.
We look forward to seeing you!