Marlena Stallworth

The best career advice I can share is to really sort out the alignment between your personal and professional goals and what a company offers. You need to allow yourself to figure out what that should look like for you and whether it's aligned, because if it's not, the company is not going to change for one person. If it's very clear in the interview process, it gives you both - you and the company - the opportunity to assess: is this a relationship that we can continue to build together? Your career deserves as much care as your spouse and your children and your parents do, because you spend most of your time at work every day.

It really is what you want to make it, because it's still a very young industry and things are changing very rapidly. So two things: one, it really is what you can make it. And two, make it your business to stay abreast of economic trends, because they're going to impact fintech so fast. A lot of these companies start really small, so the bottom line is always going to be such a big deal. You've got to stay on top of economic trends.

I would say we still have an opportunity to invest more in learning and development and what that could do across the entire company. Right now, I'm the official trainer in our customer-facing organization, and I'm starting to pick up small requests from other parts of the company like underwriting, credit, applications, and engineering, because it's not fully developed in those areas. When I first started with the company, managers just took whatever resources they had and did their own kind of training, but it didn't have as much structure as the customer-facing organization which I work for now. This is definitely an industry-wide thing in fintech and a lot of startups. I've had a lot of job offers from people seeking my expertise because it's not a big priority in other companies, but they see how it can really help. I think it'll develop over time, because these companies want to make a lot of money first before they put a whole lot of money into things that don't bring in revenue directly, so those are very tough calls.

Without sounding political, forward movement that doesn't leave anyone underrepresented is really important to me. I'm actually one of the founding leaders still at the company of our employee resource group. That underlying cultural value - it would be uncomfortable for me if it wasn't apparent wherever I'm working. No particular culture should appear underrepresented or undervalued or thought of less. It's important to me to really, really uplift every single demographic that you can identify within your company. Everybody should just feel that honor and elevation throughout the company. I also value my family deeply - we have four kids. I journal a lot and wrote a lot of poetry when I was younger. I volunteer for different things at church, and I donate as much as possible to chapters that focus on women and children, which is a cause that's really near and dear to my heart.