In June 2015, the Digital Finance Institute joined SWIFT’s Innotribe and Carlisle & Galligher Consulting Group (now NTT DATA) to lead in FinTech diversity as the first organizations to address and support diversity in FinTech with the creation of the first White Paper on PowerWomen in FinTech authored by Sam Maule and Christine Duhaime, enabled by SWIFT and published strategically at the Digital Finance Institute’s first FinTech Conference held in Vancouver in June 2015, and following that, we created a showcase of the most powerful women in Tech as a website called FemTech Leaders which featured profiles written by Sam Maule.

The White Paper on Power Women in FinTech, 2015, is available here –>FemTech Leaders White Paper.

FemTech Leaders profiles impactful women in FinTech from around the globe and has featured, for example, Fereshteh Forough, the CEO and Founder of Code to Inspire, Seema Patel, Senior Director of Visa Direct, Tuva Palm, Managing Director of Klarna, Allison Miller, Ads Risk of Google, Marsha Barnes, Founder of The Finance Bar and Andra Sonea, Lead Architech at Lloyd’s Banking Group Digital Innovation Lab, to name a few.

In addition to its importance as a leader in FinTech diversity, the FemTech Leaders project has spawned several meet-up groups for women in FinTech around the world, building upon the FinTech global ecosystem that the Digital Finance Institute, NTT Data and Innotribe fostered.

We’re very proud of the Canadian roots of FemTechLeaders.  Here is a nice post by SWIFT’s Peter Vander Auwera that explains the genesis FemTechLeaders, born in Canada, reproduced below.

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By Peter Vander Auwera, Co-Founder Innotribe at SWIFT

“Way back in November 2014, I got this DM tweet from Sam Maule:  “Been asked to put together a list of top 100 women in FinTech globally for [DFI] conference in March. Looking for your input.”

I reached out to Sam and suggested we could make it a major design theme for Innotribe at Sibos 2015, SWIFT’s premier event for the financial industry, and produce a joint whitepaper on Power Women in FinTech. It was the start of a fantastic collaboration with Sam and Christine Duhaime @cduhaime from Digital Finance Institute, culminating with the release of the paper on June 3, 2015 at Digital Finance 2015, the first Canadian FinTech conference, held in Vancouver.

We did not want it to be yet-another-list. We did not want it to be another girl-geek-power list. What we wanted was a list of women making a difference in the financial services industry, whether they were having C-level roles in their organisations or were change agents deep in the fabric of their institutions. We were looking at big and small financial institutions, startups, investors, and VCs, and our ambition was to span the globe.

We compiled all existing lists we found and also did a crowdsourcing via twitter and other social media. We had a strong list, but we believed we could better represent regions such as South America, Africa, and Asia and reached out to our contacts to get additional suggestions.

We ended up with a list of 437 Power Women in FinTech, and the paper we released was one of the most downloaded papers published by Innotribe in 2015.

But Sam kept on going. He conducted an impressive number of interviews highlighting key success stories of Power Women coming from various FinTech companies and banks, growing the list to more than 800 women across the world.

End-August marked the launch of the website for FemTech Leaders. Dedicated to these women, it started with the publication of some 25 in-depth interviews from the original list. The website is now leading into a movement of Power Women with regular meet-ups in different continents.

As promised, we also involved a number of the Power Women in our flagship event “Innotribe at Sibos 2015” (Singapore, from 12-15 Oct 2015) to stimulate discussion and debate along the week.

We are extremely honoured to have enabled this initiative in collaboration with Carlisle & Gallagher Consulting Group and the Digital Finance Institute.

It has been an incredible experience and we express our gratitude to Sam, Christine and all the Power Women for their hard work and dedication in authoring an important and timely white paper, its associated website, and movement.”