Frida Jonsdottir | Deloitte
As a Senior Consultant at Deloitte I head up the firm's Nordic FinTech capability. Growing up in Reykjavik Iceland, I spent most of my spare time training classical and modern ballet, and attended the National Ballet Academy of Iceland as well as the Commercial College of Iceland. Eventually academics took over though and after graduating college at 19, I moved to the UK to become an au-pair and later attended university. After completing a degree in Economics and Finance from Exeter University I joined Deloitte as an Analyst in their Technology Consulting business. I quickly started focusing on technology innovation in the financial sector and began to specialise in the industry. After a secondment with a FinTech startup accelerator I started focusing solely on FinTech, working with both big corporates and startups across EMEA, helping them collaborate to create new products and services in the industry. I have always been passionate about building new businesses and entrepreneurship, which is what attracted me to this type of work and the industry.
Outside of work I run my own company on the side together with my mother, creating and producing natural and organic skincare products in Iceland. The company is my passion which I started as a result from battling with my own skincare problems. We are currently selling our products in six countries across Europe, and have been featured in several magazines and other media.
I also loves to travel and experience new cultures and scenery, with this year’s travel plans already including Thailand, Singapore, New York, South Africa and Bali. I am a water sport enthusiast and try to spend as much time as possible both sailing and diving, and plan to start learning to surf later this year.
Lucia Alejandra Carrillo | Bloomberg
Carla Mazzaccherini | Morgan Stanley
Katerina Domenikou | Bloomberg
Born and raised in Ithaca, Greece, Katerina's childhood dream was to discover the palace of Odysseus. In her teens, she realised where her true passion lay and set off to pursue her personal Odyssey in technology. She studied Computer Engineering & Informatics at the University of Patras, graduating as the top student; then moved to London to do an MSc in Management at Cass Business School to engage more with her entrepreneurial side.
Katerina joined Bloomberg in 2010 as a software developer to put in practice her skills and further develop and challenge herself. She worked for six years on developing a high-capacity trading platform focusing on improving its performance. To quench her thirst for learning, Katerina joined the News Search Team to work on the News Alerting backend. This processes around 10 million search queries a day and is based on the open-source project, Apache Solr.
As a passionate advocate of Diversity and Inclusion, Katerina has been leading Bloomberg's Women in Tech Community (BWIT) in London since 2013. This initiative promotes female talent in technology, inspiring the younger generation to pursue a career in technology. Public speaking was her kryptonite, but Katerina was determined to overcome this, believing it is imperative for achieving her goal of making people excited about technology and championing Diversity and Inclusion. She grabs every opportunity to engage with a larger audience, from participating to panel discussions to delivering workshops and keynotes. One of her key priorities is supporting female tech speakers and providing them with a platform to grow and increase their visibility. That was the birth of BWIT Tech Talk Series, successfully running for a 3rd year this year.
Taylor May Woolsey | Moven
Nana Yaa Mensah | Worldpay
After an early career in financial services underwriting mortgages for companies such as Abbey National (now Santander) and the Woolwich, I was lucky enough to be involved in a technology initiative and fell in love with creating great software.
Moving into the world of payments a couple of years ago was quite daunting, but it very quickly became clear it was a great move. It's such an exciting industry that really embraces innovation. I never cease to be amazed by the different ways there are to pay, across countries and cultures. Enabling businesses to reach new customers around the world, giving people access to goods, services and opportunities that our grandparents couldn't have dreamed of is very rewarding to me.
Nicole Sandler | Barclays
Sian King | Worldpay
Sian joined the business in 2014 as a graduate product designer and in the last few years she has grown tremendously into a very capable and passionate Product Designer.
In her time at Worldpay she has worked predominantly on My Business Dashboard, the flagship online portal for all of our SME customers. She helped shape the user experience and design, setting the bar high for all future Worldpay products. Her key deliverables are detailed wireframes and high-fidelity designs which are well received by our development teams, and she works closely on the release cycle to ensure the quality of the product is at the highest possible standard. Sian is well versed in demos to showcase this work internally and externally.
Sian redesigned Worldpay’s customer invoices to make them easier to understand and on brand; this has now been adopted across the business as our customers move from paper invoicing to digital.
In terms of helping others, she has taken on a number of initiates to drive an agenda of better user experience (UX) in Worldpay. For example, she saw an opportunity as there were no resources or training in Worldpay on understanding user experience and presented to the Product team and Business Analysts on low-cost, high-quality education tools to change the way people learn design and UX. Sian is a keen advocate of product user testing and is constantly looking at ways that we can test and learn before we release features to customers – putting the customer first.
Inbar Ravid | Deloitte
Isabel Cooke | Barclays
Isabel is an active speaker at events, recently participating as a panellist at a TechUK event, discussing the current state of the UK DLT industry, one year after the release of the Government Science Office’s whitepaper addressing this topic.
Her previous role was Operations Lead at Rise London, one of Barclays Open Innovation Labs, connecting the bank to startups, to co-create the future of financial services. Here, she worked with an array of FinTech companies in fields ranging from AI, to RegTech, and of course, Blockchain. Isabel maintains a passion for connecting incumbent companies with startups, and is a ‘chaperone’ on Accenture’s FinTech Innovation Lab, helping these startups to meet with relevant contacts within Barclays.
Isabel started her career on the graduate programme at Barclays Investment Bank, in Events Marketing, where she developed her aptitude for project and stakeholder management. She then discovered her passion for Fintech, recognising that she could help shape the future of financial services by being more closely involved with emerging technology. With this realisation, Isabel moved to Rise, and now into blockchain, embarking on a mission to help the bank look forward; she hasn't looked back since.