Andra Sonea

Lead Solutions Architect, Digital Innovation Lab at Lloyds Banking Group

London, England

@andrasonea | LinkedIn Profile

I am the Lead Solutions Architect for the Innovation & Digital Development Directorate of Lloyds Banking Group. I work with the Innovation Lab and Digital Analytics teams in order to deliver well-structured experiments that answer the important questions faced by the business. I am very active in the FinTech world, as it is part of my role to know the market very well and understand the emerging business models. Internally, I see myself as an evangelist because I consider it critically important to articulate my findings in such a way that key decision makers are well informed, understand the threats and opportunities and can make better decisions based on the information provided.

During our initial call you struggled to recall ever experiencing bias as a woman in your career? Why do you believe this is the case?

I grew up in communist Romania where the rule was that everybody worked. As a chemical engineer, my mum was leading an important lab in the only car factory in the country. It did not cross my mind that women could have less rights, less access or that there are professions that women cannot pursue. With the fall of communism in 1989, a wide range of opportunities for work, travel and education materialized and I grabbed them with both hands. At twenty-five I was already a project manager on the largest SAP implementation in the country. By the time I left Romania in 1998 I had not experienced gender bias so, it was not part of my mental constructs. Working afterwards in Italy, France and Germany the environment I experienced as a consultant was meritocratic— very much focused on being able to understand the client, to deliver usable software and to cooperate with diverse teams. Only when I started finding myself repeatedly as the only woman in large meetings full of men did I started asking myself where the other women were.

I am not saying that gender bias does not exist. Looking back, I have experienced it myself, but culturally I didn’t have a label for it. Because I faced other serious roadblocks early in my life –discrimination on political grounds, the complex visa systems of three countries, and partial hearing loss when I was twenty-nine – I think I easily disregarded any gender bias thrown my way as narrowness of mind from the person expressing it. To me, the lack of tolerance and understanding for diversity that some people continuously broadcast is just personal choice and narrowness of mind.

You’ve had the opportunity to work in roles throughout Europe (Romania, Italy, Germany and the UK). Do you believe this diversity of work experience is a major benefit in your FinTech career?

As a consultant I’ve experienced the cultural diversity of working with international teams and equally important a large diversity of industries, clients, problems to solve. I’ve learned Italian and German while working and French, English and Russian in school. It is indeed a great advantage in a business environment to understand almost every language in the room and to be able to communicate with your clients in their native language. On the other side you are forced to think deeply about how to get your point across because: 1) you don’t have the same language fluency, and; 2) one’s culture really determines the way they structure a problem and you must be sensitive to that reality.

Even if in Fintech I work only in English, this experience got me used to start every discussion with an open mind and listen very carefully to the way problems are framed.

What helps me most though is that before getting into Fintech I had the chance to experience other industries and then work with some of the biggest banks in the world learning first-hand the inner workings of a bank. Now, when I assess a Fintech idea, I always think practically where this would fit, what it could replace or improve, how “disruptive” it could really be.

What do you believe are a few of the major roadblocks preventing more women from participating in the FinTech ecosystem?

I am not sure why there are not more women in FinTech and I keep asking myself this because, again and again at events, I find I am the only woman in the room. At times I joke with my friends: “Is there a culling I am not aware of?” Do women give up, or are they just not interested in the subject? Either way it is a big loss for the industry in terms of skills and ideas.

I don’t think that FinTech excludes women through either content or attitude. I have always found the industry friendly – and definitely exciting and fun. To those who hesitate starting on the tech path, I would say my career hasn’t been a string of technical jobs behind a computer screen as many imagine the world of tech to be, but rather a continuous opportunity to bring real change in organisations through technology. I would encourage those who want to leave the industry to identify clearly what it would take to make them stay, what would motivate and excite them to communicate their requirements and then push for attaining them. I read somewhere that “a good workplace is one in which you can look around and see versions of yourself five years from now, or ten.” I fully agree with this statement. We cannot all look to Sheryl Sandberg for inspiration. Women need role models closer to them.

As a last remark, I think a key access barrier for many working women in London (and not only in FinTech) is the systematic lack of a supporting infrastructure for childcare. You have to have a childcare empire of flawless logistics in place, otherwise you cannot put in the hours, the effort and the concentration required. You also have to afford to run the empire in parallel with your work. It is expensive and you are still the manager, knowing all the milestones and bottlenecks. In my view, more flexible working arrangements are a way to attract women in any industry.

Who has had the greatest influence your own career?

I grew up listening to my father on Sunday morning talking about engines and car prototypes, which made me believe that passion is a necessary ingredient in one’s profession. Later on, I was very lucky to be part of the first generation of SAP consultants in Romania. On my first project I was thrown in the deep end – the unchartered territory of implementing the entire financial accounting module of SAP for a furniture manufacturing company. I internalised quickly the responsibility for software delivery: somebody will use your software eight hours per day in his or her job and the company will base its decisions on the processes you designed.

Later on, working for IBM, I had the opportunity to meet brilliant minds like nowhere else. These encounters – however brief – opened up completely new territories for me. This is where and how I moved from SAP into architecture, innovation and FinTech.

Last but not least during my MBA at London Business School I worked with people from all over the world and a wide variety of professions: from doctors and lawyers to accountants and actors – and even Apache helicopter pilots! In addition to the cultural diversity, the school offered me some of the most interesting and challenging intellectual experiences of my life. I remember leaving Professor Sumantra Goshal’s lectures speechless because he was talking about such important, yet subtle ideas that I felt that I had to continue to “chew” on them uninterrupted, afraid that I hadn’t absorb them fully. For me, it was a life school not a business school.

What do you see as the three leading future trends for FinTech? How will these impact the bank?

There are many technologies available today that, if used to build a bank from scratch, would allow for a very different business model to emerge. I hope that this is what the “challenger” banks do. There are, for example, many things under the big blanket of Big Data technology. Slowly, we are seeing banks using some of these for Customer 360 views and analytics. However, I haven’t yet seen a case where Big Data technology permeated deeper layers of the bank and I believe that this would be the most transforming use case. We see banks spending small fortunes from siloed budgets to meet regulatory requirements. Big Data Technology would allow them to create an agile and multi-regulatory responsive environment. I haven’t seen any appetite yet for this, but I believe in this idea.

Secondly, almost everything that is part of an architecture stack can be accessed as a service – infrastructure, software, various applications, analytics, data, you name it. Banks’ typical approach to technology is in contradiction with the movement towards any-technology-as-a-service. I am not sure if this will change or not, but for sure there is a pressure in this direction.

Although I am not able to code anything in blockchain, I am very interested in this technology and follow its applications and use cases religiously. If one has any doubt about it, listening to Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum for one hour will help almost anybody visualise a future in which blockchain is a powerful enabling technology.