Small Business Finance: How AI & Embedded Capital Changes Funding

Small businesses do not always know that they need financing until payroll, repairs or expansion put pressure on their cash flow. By that point, applying for a traditional loan may already take too long. Claurelle Rakipovic has spent much of her career working on this problem. She went from building international payments products at Amazon to leading Pipe, an embedded capital platform for small businesses.

For this Women Leading the Way podcast episode, host Maria Tunikova sits down with Claurelle to discuss how AI, alternative data and embedded capital are changing small business finance. She explains how financial providers can use both financial records and operating signals to understand how a company is performing. Then they determine if it needs additional capital or not.

This wider view can make funding more relevant to a business’s actual situation. Metrics such as order fulfilment, operating hours and changes in daily activity may reveal growth or financial pressure. Traditional credit data alone can easily miss it.

Claurelle also explains why AI should sit at the core of financial infrastructure rather than appear as another visible feature. At Pipe, it supports underwriting, fraud prevention, compliance and operations. This helps the company assess businesses continuously and deliver capital through the platforms they already use.

Drawing on her experience at Amazon and Capital Group, Claurelle discusses what it takes to build financial products in highly regulated environments. Just as candidly, she reflects on making decisions without controlling every detail and building fast teams without sacrificing accountability.

Her advice to women entering fintech and AI is to define readiness for themselves, keep learning and avoid treating a career as a fixed ladder.

Connect with Claurelle Rakipovic:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/claurelle 

More about Pipe:

https://pipe.com/

Transcript

unknown 0:00

Women leading the way.

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hey everyone, welcome to Women Leading the Way by Trofa Combs, a podcast about women shaping the future of finance, fintech, blockchain, and technology. Here we don't talk about titles or success stories, we talk about real moments that shape a career and how leadership changes when women are in the room. I'm Maria, and in this episode we explore Rombi Korea through personal journey. Today we are talking about access to capital, how technology and AI can make financial products faster and more useful. Our guest is Clorel Rakipovich, CEO of Pipe, an embedded capital platform helping software companies offer financing directly to the business they serve. Before Pipe, Clorel built learning and international payments businesses at Amazon and led product development at Capital Group. Her career has taken her across economics, entrepreneurship, technology, and global financial services. Together we'll talk about what she has learned from building financial products at scale, how AI is changing small business finance, and what it takes to lead at the intersection of technology risk responsibility as a woman. So, Clorel, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Thank you so much, Maria. Great to have you here.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Clorel, your career has moved across very different industries, companies, and even countries. So uh you began as an economics researcher, also founded a technology company very early in your career, and later you moved into lending, payments, and also investment management. So let's start like with that journey. How did it all start? What first attracted you to the financial sphere?

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yes. The odd thing that I don't put anywhere that people may not have read is that my career probably started when I was 15. My father moved us out of South Africa when apartheid ended. And I grew up in Thailand. And he threw me at that age into trading steel for his business, which was the equivalent of physical stainless steel to East Asian companies that needed the scrap metal. I'll tell you that because it's really, I only reflect now. I was irritated at my father in some way for putting me through this. But I look back and realize the degree to which he gave me autonomy, the ability to understand and drive my own perspective on what was happening with any given deal, but also just know the difference in negotiating and trading and more importantly, lift me out of what I felt was a very sheltered version of the world because South Africa was a very difficult time. And I was one of two non-white students in a white school when I first joined, it changed my perspective of myself and what was possible. So I actually feel like my journey started there. And as it's evolved, uh, the a couple of threads have held very true. When I started the Martech company, which was like a YouTube for business on user-generated content, as well as what's happened through Amazon, uh, even partly in Capital Group, which is an older but very large asset management company. I think the invention pieces and being able to do things at scale have driven me tremendously. And that's true even today at Pipe. The things that are possible today with what we have available to us change the dimension of what's valuable and possible in the world. And so uh my that that is a thread that's held all the way through. I think the other one that's held very strongly for me, which is one that I have to battle every now and then, is technical depth. So, do you have a whole system view of what is going on deeply? And that's meant that, you know, whether it was at Amazon and leading lending, starting in product, I had to really understand deeply the science to know how I could move the levers of the business. Similarly, that kind of learning and curiosity and depth has to be true in many things I'm doing today. But if you don't do that with the perspective of what it means for the whole system you're creating, you have a short chance of missing part of the opportunity. And so I'll pause there to say uh that journey started in a in a slightly unexpected, unchosen way. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yeah, that's wonderful. And I really like the idea of combining technical depth with like a systems perspective because it feels like that's been a consistent threat throughout your career. And speaking of scale at Amazon, you build lending and international businesses payments across multiple markets as well. So, my question is what did that experience teach you about building financial services at scale?

SPEAKER_01 4:24

So many things. Uh, I think, first of all, it is a huge company, but the thing that I took away most, which I find invaluable still today, is the number of leaders I was exposed to who knew very well how to start from zero and build to billions. I had a leader who I knew, who I still know today and is a good friend, who's done that three times inside Amazon. Literally sat on the very first iteration of something and grown that business over billions of dollars. That is a large company, but with an incredible machine of creating perspective on what is the biggest, hairiest, audacious thing you can do, and actually building it from the start. And now that's in the safety. So the big company part is the safety is you have culture that's predefined, you have the ways people behave and our incentives are predefined, you have a balance sheet and money and those kinds of things around you. So that big company part was true. But for me, the biggest lessons I took away from that were how to, in a sense, think much bigger and act in a lot of precision. How to do that and then also not be involved in the weeds all the time. Amazon is incredible auditing mechanisms. How do you think about the inputs that drive the outputs of what you're doing? So you don't have to be the one who's constantly looking in on the business. So I started in product, but truly my journey shifted quite quickly to an overall business role where I was responsible for the stakes of the PL, but responsible for the direction of the impact on the customer, in addition. And the way you audit that got out of my hands, right? I wasn't the one who had to do the work. And so Amazon really taught me that in a in a way that I am finding valuable beyond that. When you are doing that and you have to be the one who can move ahead without having to do all the work yourself, the people call that scaling, people call that delegation, whatever it is. You actually need to be able to assess your leaders, not just on their technical ability, but their ability to drive a business from their ability to judge well, move fast, be vocally self-critical when they're not okay and something has not worked, and fix it, learn and be curious about what they're optioning. All these things I've learned how to assess. And so Amazon gave me that as well. And so you call a big company in some way. I think there is a strong dimension of that. But what's stayed with me that I think is invaluable to the entrepreneurial side are these other dimensions. Audit, big hairy, audacious, stay out of your own world and look to the biggest thing possible, execute it. But very importantly, how do you get the talent around you to reflect not just their technical ability, but their behaviors in a way that drives the business forward? And can you assess that? So I had to do hundreds and hundreds of interviews across Amazon assessing those behaviors. And that is that alone is a skill I never would have created outside of that bigger company company context. I say that because I advocate for it and I don't like the genericism of big is bad. If you say that. Yeah, yeah.

unknown 7:23

Women leading the way.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

It sounds really like every step gave you a completely different perspective on financial services. And then you move to capital group, which was quite a different environment from Amazon and small business lending. So, what was it like building products for investors instead? And how different was that from building products for small businesses?

SPEAKER_01 7:48

So, um, you know, putting the full financial lens on, I think, you know, just recognize that much of the work I've done in financial services to now has been highly regulated, as most of financial services is are, but they've been within context of companies that get very high scrutiny. And so the common pieces were, you know, at Amazon, I had to stand up to regulators on the machine learning outcomes that we were driving, and for example, how biased or unbiased they were towards certain segments. You have to literally justify that. Beyond that, Amazon's a retail company, it's not a financial company. And so, what is it that we were taking as risks for the company that they were not willing to tolerate? Similarly, at Capital Group, you can imagine the level of scrutiny on the money you and I are trying to invest with that party. And a big part of my job was creating, helping to create these funds that would stand up to that regulatory scrutiny. So if you said it was a fund that was to do with sustainability, could you really prove that there was materiality in the investment decision, first of all, which is the basics? Are you making a return? But could you also prove that these were truly about sustainability? And that was in both circumstances, whether it had been, you know, the financial situation at Amazon or the financial business we were driving at Capital Group, I had to unpick people's mindsets of resistance towards resistance towards what we were trying to do that was new, but I also had to do the same thing for external parties, so for regulators as well. I guess the common piece has been always being a bit on the edge of redefining, which was actually fun. So that was very common. I think the thing that was harder, possibly, is that in some environments, you know, in some companies, they're very used to being on the edge of redefining, and in other companies, they're not. And so that took also a lot of, I have a many lessons about what it means to create a new perspective and bring people along rather than have them reject the change.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

And so but I think that looking back, it feels like each step of your career prepare you for pipe in a very different way, like economics, entrepreneurship, lending, payments, uh so investment management as well. Uh a lot of lessons from different areas. And when you first uh looked at pipe, what made like the opportunity you feel different? Maybe the mission, the product, the market timing, or just the chance to bring different parts of your previous experience together.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

I would have someone told me day before yesterday, who's an incredibly talented person. Uh, when I met them first, they told me in a call that uh, you know, when I chose to join Pipe, it is something I actually had in part done before. And when they learned that about me and that I had made that choice deliberately, it was a bit of a letdown to them. I'll tell you the very pragmatic side of that, but I'll tell you the other part as well. The very pragmatic side of what I chose there was I don't think anyone today can afford to not look at the spaces they're in and reinvent it. We're living at a time where the tools we have available to us make very new types of value possible. So while I was doing this in 2014, when banks thought that underwriting with alternative data that I had, which was hundreds of variables that were nothing to do with the sales or the credit score or the business, wasn't not really that possible at the scale, at any level of scale. And now people take that for granted. That was one leap. But there are other leaps today. And I think the reason the space is so interesting is because it's also not just about lending. I see a much bigger story at play here, which is what does it mean that today, take the investment management part of the world? You and I can trust Robin Hood and mutual funds, et cetera, to manage our money and we keep our hands off the wheel. Why is that not true for a medium, a small business today? There are probably dimensions of it that are definitely true for enterprise. Why is it that a small business cannot not worry if they're not even know if they're running out of cash? Why is it that a bank won't tell them they're going to have an insufficient charge? And I'm telling you that it sounds, it might sound trite, but we have not given the opportunity to specific power engine of our economy to be able to have the extent of the tools around us creating value for them on things they don't, they shouldn't have to think about. They're the ones who are sitting at the edge of their business thinking about their system that creates value for their customers, but their financial life is pasted together on a bunch of things that for the most, some of them are sophisticated ads, some of them are not. But it'd be wonderful if they didn't even have to think about whether they need a loan to just cover the fact that they've got a payroll challenge on Friday, or whether or not they can afford to do another location expansion, right? There are many things we have today that have redefined what this business is. It is about lending, but it's way more than that, which is what does it mean for this business to itself have a system that doesn't can take care of itself as we do when we give our investments to someone else? Yeah, that's very interesting. The pragmatic side, the less pragmatic side is something that is true to being a woman. I've spent 20 years deep giving my one arm and my other arm and my other leg and my other leg to stuff that I have been up to. And I became a mom four years ago, and I have three and four year old. Thank you. Uh, they are tremendously curious and make me laugh, and my husband laughed tremendously. Very joyful to be a mom. And I say that to you because I couldn't change too many variables at once. I moved geography. We've lived in three countries in the last four years, and the kids have moved with us, and they're very adaptable at this age, especially. That's all working. But I also wanted to deepen in my domain rather than flip entirely to something new. So you might find that dry. I think it was a very good move on many dimensions. And aside from that, I've taken on a, we can talk more about this, but being in CEO role has really shifted. Being in CEO role has really shifted the opportunities I am taking and the seat I've put myself in has made me incredibly uh driven around what I can do beyond what I've done before. So I the choice was because I saw a path that was bigger than what I've done before. But the choice was also about how many variables do you change at once because you will lose your mind.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

I really like that perspective, actually. And we will definitely come back to the female leadership title a bit later, but for now, I'd love to stay with the pipe for a moment. For people who may not be familiar with the term, how would you explain embedded capital? And in simple words, what does pipe actually do?

SPEAKER_01 14:43

So, today, when you get your order for Uber Eats and you're delivering on a Friday night and you're about to watch a movie, that is a business that is operating on a platform. And that platform is actually giving a digital version of what that brick and mortar store version is. And the world has moved dramatically towards that. You order your drive there, you get your food there, you get your gardener there, you get your task rabbit there, whatever it is. What this is doing is meeting that business where they're operating every day. So if you're doing your orders and your commerce online, your banking and your finance makes natural sense to be there too. More importantly, there's a tremendous amount of new information that has become available to a company like ours that's providing financial products because you can measure things that are going on, not just financial things, actually. More importantly, you can measure how that business is operating. Do they fulfill their orders well? Do they leave their hours? Do they keep cutting their hours and they're showing that something is a bit distressed about it? There's new types of information that give you indicators of how that business is functioning, not just what are they financially producing. Embedded means can you put yourself in that place as well and present something that is of value to them? So if what we are doing is saying, let us give you the chance when you are looking for an ability to cover a repair, expand something. And by the way, you don't even have to apply for it. So what we're doing is we're we're getting data from these platforms proactively. We're assessing it on a daily basis. That data is financials but operating type things as well. And our models are saying this business looks healthy enough to get $50,000, $100,000, $200,000, $20,000. And across the range, those offers get presented to them. When they surface, they're surfacing in the place where they're operating every day. They take four clicks to confirm things about their identity and how much money they do want to take of the 20,000, of the 100,000. They can come back and draw more over time and do it again. It operates like a bit of a safety blanket. But once they click, they want it, nine more than 90% of the time, that money is in their bank account the next day or within hours, actually. And we're doing that now in five countries, and we're doing it for platforms that are helping these businesses grow. I was I am measuring our business as I did when I was at Amazon on the growth of these businesses when we provide them that capital. So when we embed, they accept it, they get the money, they do something with it. What's happening is that on average, they're growing 11% month on month, month on month. Wow, whoa, is it capital, right? That was the measure by the way, it was also measured on at Amazon. It was not, are you making fantastic interest on those on those loans? Women leading the way podcast.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

You work a lot with AI, and a lot of companies are now adding AI like as a visible feature, I can say, like a chat board, maybe assistant or even workflow tool. But at Pipe, AI looks like more closer to the core being added, like underwriting, for also compliance funding operations. Why was it like important to build AI into the core of the business rather than add it later, like a simple feature?

SPEAKER_01 18:07

I think no one has a choice for people. Let's just say if you're paying attention, you know, it's like inflation, it's just slowly eating away at what might be your advantage. So there's a negative point to that. But the positive side of it is the following it does turn into a chatbot. It turns into the things that you're already doing becoming incrementally better. But we're sitting on a fundamental change. We're sitting on something that has the ability to unlock new value that hasn't ever been created before. It has challenges in that, but I uh in terms of how you get that to really be true, we won't get into the how in a minute. But the reason I have deliberately chosen that the company does this, you know, we were building agents last January, in January to March, which were first giving us the experience internally of what we could do to trust and decipher where the value was. I think that's really at the moment one of the hardest challenges. Where is the real opportunity and it's worth the investment? But that's still the incremental way of looking at it. The more controversial way, which leans a little more Jack Dorsey, if you want to call it that, is what is the system your business is operating? And by the way, that somehow harks back to my Amazon experience as well. You know, I felt like at the time when I was running a whole business, as I do today when I'm running a CEO, your job is to create the operating system of the company. That's to do with the people, it's to do with the machines, it's to do with the customers, it's to do with investors, it's to do with all those things. And today, those things have become, on some dimensions, quite deterministic, as in you put in these inputs, you get these outputs, way more than we've had in the past. And then there are parts of it that are very knowledge-specific and judgment-based that are that require you to trust your answer. And so the technology we have today from an AI perspective is not just sitting on the increments. What it's doing is trying to decipher those parts of our business that can become not automated, they can be you can rethink what the system is. I don't need something to define the steps that a human does. What I need is for the outcome for the customer to still be achieved with where there are deterministic outcomes, yes or no, you can or you cannot, with a process. And that process does not have to be the process the human fulfilled, right? And so even when we're doing this for our fraud and compliance agents last year, we were not looking at what do the fraud teams do and should we replicate those checks faster. No, we were asking the question of what is it that we're trying to triangulate with these, in some ways, gray data points. And we were trying to at that time just achieve something where a human could oversee the judgment. But there were also other things that became quite deterministic and it just removed the steps. There were things that were removed. A human would have to do many steps to hold the same seven pieces of information in their brain. A machine does not. So it's looking at the problem from a very different perspective, which is really two main questions. One is what are the returns you're after that matter more than others? There's three questions. What are the turns returns you're after that is worth it more than others? Where does the technology lean positively towards that? Which is more knowledge-based actions than judgment and trust-based actions. And the third is what new value are you creating? And it can't just be operational efficiency because we're not, we're sitting on a much bigger opportunity, which is operational inefficiency. Fraud and compliance thing, we've gone all the way to the end of the year of using other kinds of data now to get closer to the whole financial decision of a company. Why are they even bothering with capital? They're bothering with capital because there's something, there's a gap they're trying to fill. Can I predict that gap? Not only can I predict that gap, by the way, I can. I can tell you what today with the types of business money in and money out views I have for some of the population, I can tell you. Bank balance on Friday. And so does that mean they need to apply for capital? No, I can spot you $4,000 without you asking me. So now your lending becomes a programmable thing. You're not actually needing to decide if you need to borrow money, etc. I'm giving you the context-specific way in which it's possible for you before you know you need it.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Hopefully, that example is holding water.

SPEAKER_00 22:23

Yeah, I like the idea, especially that we are not trying to replace people with AI, but we're creating something more powerful with this technology. And looking ahead, what do you think will define like the next stage of small business finance? Like, will the future be more real-time, more embedded, or maybe more personalized?

SPEAKER_01 22:46

All of that is true. All of that is true. And that is the near-term opportunity. And we're still, we've still got a lot to gain around that. It's the example I just gave you, which is you're not going to be able to make your payroll on Friday. You need to do a marketing campaign. Can you afford it? And those contextual pieces will become even more personalized. I think that's true. I think everyone is also racing. When I say everyone, I mean there are a lot of businesses that are coming at this from different perspectives. There's, you know, the platforms that are attaching their things. There are payments providers who are trying to be full suite on all the banking solutions, many, many angles here. In a sense, what it's indicating is that they know that the financial life of the business is gravitating towards the internet economy, the digital platform, and they want to be there at there. They don't want to have to get you out to do your accounting, to do your payroll, to do your lending. However, I think we're still at an early stage in what that which that feels like a fully trusted and integrated experience. You know, part of the reason why we went as much as we did into multi-geo is because, and into multi-product, uh now piloting in a card related to a charge card related to capital, is that you really, for some things, you don't want to have too many providers. It disjoints the experience, but it's also a lot of overhead. And so that I think that vein will continue to be true. And underlying that is an understanding of a more holistic understanding of what the customer is up to and the data that is that is around that. But I think the one that is very early and is becoming even just a bigger story, in my view, is this part about these things becoming programmable. The very far future version of the world of that is anything you'll see with stable coins and Bitcoin. Lending is not in those worlds clunky, like how we're talking about. It sits in a context in which you can literally define the contract of when something will happen and it will happen. That's a very different world. And I don't want to talk too much about it, but there is a really interesting evolution. There's no question that stable coins are becoming a meaningful part of the way people are thinking about the evolution of our money economy. But fast, you know, return to today, I still think the opportunity are the things that you're saying. And what people are are probably missing most is that it's it's not necessarily a winner-take all market, but you definitely need to be in a position where you are you're able to keep defining the needs of the customer properly rather than applying old products to the need. So if I said to you, for sure a term loan is what matters, just in a basic sense, it doesn't always matter. Sometimes you need it for other things. That's the basic version. But then the other part of it is for sure the business has a just a capital need or a capital need at that moment. Do you really know the right time and the right funding? And is your technical ability good enough to differentiate those who are going to be able to sustain that well enough? So I'm saying to you, we're cracking into that. There isn't a space where one player will play. Also, material differences across geography as well, which play in.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

Women leading the way. And so far we've been talking like about pipe, the market, and also the technology behind it. But those systems, uh, they're also shaped by the people and uh sometimes even wonderful female leaders as you are. So I'd love to move to this part of the story, to the leadership side of the story. And you've been working in startups, also Capital Group, Amazon, and now CEO at Pipe. So my question is what has becoming a CEO taught you that your previous like product and business roles did not? It's two things.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

So I think one is that a relatively known one, which is you've got to figure out very quickly what only you can do. The definition of that, though, is this is a nuance. The definition of that I think has changed today. So, what do I mean by what only you can do? If I'm involved in multiple decisions that are happening in the business, I'm not doing the right thing. I have to be doing the decisions that only I can decide. That means I have the context about it that no one else will have. It means that I have the conviction and the perspective on it that no one else will have. And that's my highest value add, right? Um, that does look different than being a inside of a company rather than being the leader of the company. And also looks different because my journey didn't start and stay in product. It evolved into a broader role, uh, which I think part of that is you you must choose, you need to choose that because what can happen as a trap, I think this is another nuance, is that people think that today that domain depth really, or I hear people saying this, domain depth really matters because it allows you to see the problems that are going on within your business more easily. So if you are product deep, even though you have the vision dimensions and the customer session dimensions and the drive-the-business dimensions, not just the coordination piece, which is redundant in a way in this version of the world, what you may not have is a whole system view. So I'll repeat that word. You need to be deep, but you need to be able to see across areas. For me, I think the biggest thing that shifted is asking the question of I am by definition, the CEO is by definition supposed to be the one who sees the most across all. Now you have to make sure that's true, but that is the definition. And that means that there's some things that I am going to be much better at making decisions on than others. So, how do I figure that out? How do I make my time reflect that? How do I make my strategy reflect that? So the goals of the company do. How do I make my people reflect that? They need to have different dimensions of mindset for different things we're trying to achieve. And so I have to hire in that way. And lastly, so second, the last piece of this I would say is you are it. So, you know, you define the boundary of where the business is going. You define the sphere on which you have the opportunity. And there's no one to check that decision with. There's no one to ratify it. There's no one to put a stamp on it and say, okay, keep going. You know, I would sit in, we'd sometimes do 70 iterations of a six-page document at Amazon and then put it in front of a bunch of leadership and we'd debate it rigorously. Now that debate still happens, but my point is just the definition of the frontier of that is now yours. And so that's a big, that is a big change. And the stakes are on you. And I think possibly the hardest thing is not making the decision of where to be deep and where to not be deep, but knowing that you need to be the deep one because you need a bit of range in what you see, not because you need to deep one, because you're addicted to the way you used to work, which is quite specifically focused on certain outputs and those short-term gains. You don't get short-term gains as a CEO. Absolutely. No short-term gains. And it's very hard to measure how you're doing in a way because of that. And it can be quite ego-driving and addictive to lean back into being back in the weeds of the business in a narrow corner. And I say that to you truly. It's one of these things where you have to mind shift um quite often.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Yeah, that's super interesting. And I really like what you said about leadership and decision making. And I'd love to stay with that for a moment. You've spent your career in some very technical parts of finance and fintech where women are still underrepresented in leadership roles. So, what has that journey been like for you personally?

SPEAKER_01 30:14

Yeah, I think it's fair. Uh, I'm sitting at the intersection of finance, new types of technology, like ML AI, also sitting at kind of infrastructure platform engineering, very stereotypically male. Yeah. Uh, I think the first thing is something that I told you right from the beginning, which is my father probably gave me the audacity to not let anyone label me. I still have to battle that, by the way, because the world tells you what you are. So you need a bit of audacity to not have anything be that true. I think the other parts of it are much more to do with as I've seen myself evolve, I have had to hold my own depth on the technical, where in a very typical female fashion, and I I'm somewhat generalizing, but there's enough study around this, the personalities tend to, in a female sense, overinvest in getting perfect perfected views of things, whereas male will wing it, for lack of a better phrase. And while I think that can be a very defeating thing because uh it also makes other people not trust you when you don't trust yourself, right? If you were putting up a front in a way, I'm not saying you should, but if you were putting a little bit of gap between how perfect it is and how it actually appears, people wouldn't be as nervous about you. So while that's true, I do think it's matter to me in the technical sense to know my stuff, right? Um, and no one can question me on it, but how I represent that is also matters. It's not out of insecurity, it's out of the fact that I know what the hell I'm doing for the customer and what I'm doing for the business, what I'm doing for our future. So uh what I'm saying is the attitude and the perspective matter as much as the substance. And the other thing I would say is as a woman, I don't know how I'm not a man, so I don't know how much men deal with this, but I definitely think that there are times where we assume something is our problem. And, you know, the the concrete example of that is, you know, today, one of the one of the things I didn't talk about is I'm dealing with investors today. That's a new type of stakeholder I've not had to deal with before. Uh, a board, all of those kinds of things. If you don't recognize, and this is true not just with investors or if you don't recognize the party that's sitting across from you, their psychology, why they're reacting and giving you a different perspective from what you're saying, whether it be technical field or not, if you don't recognize that and you all of a sudden just keep thinking that it's your, there's something you're doing that is not connecting, or there's something that you're doing that's a mistake, or there's something that you're doing that you haven't explained well, you will be constantly in a trap of actually not being able to make much change. So a specific example could be you're talking to someone across from the table, but they've made a decision in the past, like invested money in another company, and so they have a recessed memory that if they did this thing, it's going to cause a problem. That's not my problem. That's your problem. That's your problem because you have a bias, right? Or it's your problem because you put money in a place you shouldn't have, right? If you don't see that, you can overreact to it, trying to explain your way through it, trying to figure out why this person is being difficult. But actually, what really should happen is in a very diplomatic way, maybe you just call that out, you know. This sounds like a problem. I'm saying that to you to say that um, you know, it is a question whether some of what's going on is also just understanding the human. You know, there are many things that have have pushed me into learning that from mentors and otherwise, to unfortunately or fortunately, I'm a high advocate of the way Chris Voss, who's a FBI negotiator, is quite famous, has unpicked how you think about human psychology when you're sitting across from someone. And so I just share that with you to say that I think the stereotypical things are, you know, lean in and like have your view and whatever. But I think there's some underlying things you have to get straight, which is do you understand the psychology? Do you not overinvest? That's probably the big the biggest thing. Um, does not mean that you do not know what you're doing. Women leading the way podcast.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

Before we wrap up, let's do a quick fun segment called Traffic Light. We try to do with each episode in each episode with every guest. So the idea is quite simple. We associate our life with a road, and there is a traffic light. Green means start something new, yellow means keep going, and red means pause or do less. Not about your job, just in general about your life, everything that comes to your mind. I'll ask you just three quick questions and you will answer them without overthinking. Oh, yeah, come into the green light. So, what's the one thing you would like to start doing this year?

SPEAKER_01 35:05

This year, that's more on the psychology piece. Really learning what it means to understand the perspectives of others better and create relationship in spite of that disconnect. I think people underestimate still today the degree to which you have to be human. Uh, so that's a that's a big one. There's a lot of uh a lot of things related to that that I'm I'm invested in right now.

SPEAKER_00 35:27

I think it's very important to hear from a CEO of the company here. It shows a lot of uh the way you're a leader, you are. And um, we are coming to the yellow light. What is the one thing you would like to continue doing this year?

SPEAKER_01 35:40

Making sure that I test myself on the edges of what's possible. Uh, it is very hard to separate from something is existential and needs to be done to you need time to be outside of that. And you it's it's not about being left behind or anything. It's just so damn exciting where we are. Um, and I mean that for AI, but I mean it more deliberately for where the overall space is headed.

SPEAKER_00 36:09

Wonderful. And we are coming to the red light. What is one thing you would like to leave behind on this year, maybe or do less?

SPEAKER_01 36:17

That one, I my list is very long. It's very long. Uh so I think uh, and it's it's long because I I've gone through many transitions. I think the biggest one must be that I still hold a lot of discipline deciphering where I am the most valuable. I say that with entire humility. I feel like there are many times where I have um I have a lot of very hard trade-offs to make and I have to be able to let it be on some dimensions. And if it there's a bit of a train smash, there's a bit of a train smash, but I have to let it be. I think that has been at a mindset level, something I I it's letting go of the fact that some things were not going to play uh a certain way. And as long as they're a lower risk, I'm okay.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

That's incredible. And one final question. Uh, what one piece of advice would you like to give to women who want to start building their careers or maybe uh grow into bigger roles in fintech and the eye, but like they feel they are not 100% ready.

SPEAKER_01 37:19

It goes back right to what I said before, which is uh, you know, be be ready. But remember that ready is your definition. And if is someone else really expecting that of you, let alone what are they bringing to the table that makes that a valid expectation. And so um that's that's one. But I think I'll I'll end with the following. And I definitely have taken this from somewhere else, so it's it's not unique to me. My regret of my existence, career-wise, life-wise, et cetera, will be when I didn't learn. You don't know the degree to which people forget who you are. I'm sorry to say it that way. But you're not that important. Like no one is that important, no one remembers what happened to the people beyond some very iconic religious or political leaders, potentially, but that's not even a couple hundred years. So if you just remove the ego piece for a minute, you are gonna do some things you're gonna learn that some of them won't work out, and when they don't, move on, do the next thing, learn the next thing. You're gonna get the gratification from the fact that you created that thing, learned that lesson, created a new way of being with the environment, the people, the technology, the world around you. And that's very different from I need to climb this ladder, I need to be good at that, why do you need it? You know, you actually are going to treasure what I think is the fact that you had uh opportunity to reflex who you are.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

That's a very powerful idea, and I really like the way of looking at it. It almost shifts the focus from proving yourself to simply learning, like growing and being open to new experiences. And I think that's a really valuable message. So, Clorel, thank you so much for this conversation. I really enjoyed it because today we talked not only about AI and the future of finance, but also about leadership, curiosity, and the importance of never stop learning. And I think that's a message that will stay with a lot of people listening today, especially women, building their careers in fintech, finance, or AI. So thank you so much for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Um, it's such a pleasure to meet you if you want to talk at any time or yet.

SPEAKER_00 39:33

If this episode resonates with you, share it with the person who needs to hear it. For more stories and updates, visit womenlead.co.uk and follow us on our LinkedIn page. This was Women Leading the Way by Drofa Comps. Thanks for being with us and see you in the next episode. And don't forget, women don't just follow the way, they lead it.

SPEAKER_01 39:54

Women leading the way. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.