Elyssa Morgan, AAP, AFPP, APRP

I think it all comes down to the people that were here along the journey, as well as the people I get to interact with all the time. I am genuinely someone who wants to elevate others along with me, but I'm also always a helper and a fixer. I want to help and I want to fix, and I want to truly understand. I know that there's no necessarily dumb questions, and I think the fact that I strive to understand at a certain level means other people trust my perspective because of that. I really understand the strength in community. A lot of times, any sort of conversations I have, any speaking opportunities - I just sat on a panel - I think it all comes down to how I interact with people and the genuine connections I build.

Focus on relationships as much as results. Success is not only measured by what you accomplish personally, but by how many people you help grow, develop, and succeed along the way. Building authentic connections and maintaining a strong network creates opportunities that cannot be achieved alone.

Find a community. Ask questions. And lean on anyone who's going to be there to support you. Even if it feels like they're advocating for you for things that you're not quite ready for, take the risk, because there's a lot of reward at the end of that, whether that's learned experience or growth or an elevation in your career. Be open-minded. Above all, lead in, be open-minded, and find a community to help you continue to grow.

The biggest challenge is that innovation doesn't slow down. The competitive landscape continues to expand, and positioning really matters. That's where this larger ecosystem and all of the players in it really need to start working together to determine how they can partner and build beneficial relationships that keep them innovating at scale with some of the larger competitive forces in the environment. I think the future of payments and financial services and banking is in collaboration, because you can't do it all alone, especially with how fast the pace of change is. On the opportunity side, I think a lot of what keeps people back from innovating is their risk posture. The opportunity here is to look outside of risk being necessarily a bad thing or a negative thing. With risk always comes opportunity - it's whether it's worth it or not, and whether you can manage the risk inherent to what you're trying to do. Any sort of friction creates this opportunity for innovation. Innovation doesn't just happen because it's a fun idea; it happens because there was a problem to solve. So I think the opportunity is looking for those areas to solve those problems, to be able to capture the value for those relationships.

Just humanizing things is most important to me. Learning from mistakes and real-life experiences, and sharing those is not necessarily a bad thing, but a lesson learned. I don't want people to have to walk through challenges on their own. That's what I bring to the leadership side of me - it's very human. I like to be kind of this bridge. Not everybody understands or enters things from the same level of understanding, but they all have value to have their voices be heard. I think sharing experiences, and again, it all comes back to that community side, because that's what everything comes back to. It was funny, I was on a panel with someone, and they just kept bringing up data, and they're like, 'It all goes back to the data for me,' and I'm like, 'Well, it all goes back to the people, for me.' I think I bring a very human aspect to leadership, and I also lead through curiosity, not ego. Anytime I'm asking questions, it's to really get that deeper understanding and challenge assumptions for the better.