14 Aug 2023
Payments: the road ahead
Jackie Kallman |
The merger of BPAY, eftpos and NPPA was designed to allow these platforms to tackle the rapid evolution of the payments ecosystem. This is what the future looks like.
30 Nov 2023
Gender parity: the next steps
Many organisations in Australia across a range of industries aspire to improve gender equity in the workplace. The data shows we are improving, but there is still work to do.
According to Australia’s Gender Equality Scorecard published in December 2022, only one in five boards in Australia have gender balance and men are significantly more likely to hold managerial positions, even in female dominated industries.
"We’re getting more women into leadership roles at the next level, the senior vice president, the executive committee level, the senior director and director level. And what’s so fantastic about that is they bring other women up with them and they help to increase our employee engagement because you can’t be what you can’t see.” - Kristy Duncan
Kristy Duncan, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Women in Payments, a global association for women professionals in the payments and fintech industry, has dedicated a large swathe of her career to achieving the vision of gender parity at all leadership levels in payments, fintech and financial services.
On a recent bluenotes podcast, Kristy told me that following her long career in banking and finance, she started Women in Payments “to create a safe space for women to get up and speak, to build their industry profiles, to build their networks, to build their confidence and to get some recognition they might not otherwise get.”
Founded in Toronto, Canada in 2012, Women in Payments is now a global organization with chapters and members in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australia and South America.
During her career Kristy has seen big changes in banking in relation to diversity and inclusion. “We’ve come a long way and we’ve built some really positive momentum to realise the importance of diversity of all strands at leadership levels,” Kristy said. “We also have realised to get to where we want to be on that diversity strategy, we need to have policies, we need to have a positive initiative mandate from senior management to actually make that happen.”
She cites the 2016 review co-sponsored by Virgin Money and HM Treasury in the UK, Empowering Productivity, Harnessing the Talents of Women in Financial Services, as a global framework for progressing the gender agenda.
The report called for financial services organisations to publish their strategy, targets and progress against them, to appoint a senior business executive to champion the strategy and tie the compensation of senior management to its success.
In response to these recommendations, HM Treasury launched the Women in Finance Charter, which now has over 400 firms covering over one million employees signed up and committed to its pledge for gender balance across financial services.
One key indicator of gender equity is the gender pay gap, or the difference between the average take home pay of a woman versus the average take home pay of a man. While there is still a long way to go on gender pay parity, some inroads have been made in recent years, Kristy said.
The gender pay gap in the Australian financial and insurance services industry was 37.5 per cent in 2019, according to the Australia Workplace Gender Equality Agency. By 2022 that gap has reduced to 32 per cent and since then it has narrowed to 28.6 per cent.
It is also crucial to increase the number of women in senior leadership positions.
“We’re getting more women into leadership roles at the next level, the senior vice president, the executive committee level, the senior director and director level. And what’s so fantastic about that is they bring other women up with them and they help to increase our employee engagement because you can’t be what you can’t see.”
Having women at senior leadership levels also helps with employee engagement, hiring and staff retention, as well as increasing innovation and performance, Kristy said.
“Studies show that organisations with more women at leadership levels file more patents. And organisations with more women in leadership levels have higher return in investment (ROI). So there's lots of reasons to do this.”
Finally, Kristy has some advice to emerging leaders in payments. Firstly, be the CEO of your own career. You can’t sit back and hope someone notices your good work and promotes you, she said.
“It took me a long time to realise that's not the reality. Take your own career development into your own hands,” Kristy says.
Secondly, work to build your network because young woman can find opportunities through their networks and help others find opportunities too. And the final piece of advice is to manage your reputation.
“A reputation can take years to build and seconds to destroy. And by having a good reputation, it all dovetails into making your own luck and opening up doors for you and your career.”
Jackie Kallman is Head of Payments Industry & Engagement at ANZ
The views and opinions expressed in this communication are those of the author and may not necessarily state or reflect those of ANZ.
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28 Apr 2023
The next wave in real time payments evolution
Jackie Kallman |
Digitisation of direct debit payments offers enormous opportunity for industry players. Merchants and billers will need banks to help steer them through the complexity.