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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Women Leaders in Payments: Kristy Duncan, Founder & CEO of Women in Payments | Episode 336
Have you ever felt the weight of imposter syndrome or the glass ceiling holding you back? Kristy Duncan, the inspiring founder and CEO of Women in Payments, shares her transformative journey from her early days on a small hobby farm outside Toronto to becoming a leader in the payments industry. This special edition of the Leaders in Payments podcast, celebrating Women Leaders in Payments Month, kicks off with a fun and personal rapid-fire round, giving you a glimpse into Kristy's world beyond her career.
We then delve into the heart of Kristy's professional evolution, discussing the significant barriers that women encounter in the workplace. Kristy candidly addresses the challenges such as the sticky floor and crisis leadership roles and shares her invaluable strategies for overcoming these obstacles. Learn how mentorship, a robust professional network, and constant feedback have been her guiding principles for success. You'll also hear about pivotal experiences and personal anecdotes that shaped her resilient mindset and career trajectory.
In the final segment, Kristy offers heartfelt reflections on the importance of mentorship and the inspiring role her daughters have played in her life. She emphasizes how mentorship and sponsorship can propel emerging leaders to new heights and recounts her own experiences with formal and informal mentoring. Kristy's dedication to her career and her family's encouragement provide a powerful narrative on balancing professional ambitions with personal life. This episode is packed with insights and encouragement for anyone looking to break barriers and empower women in their careers.
Thank you for joining us during this special series running throughout the month of July, focused exclusively on women leaders and payments. We've got great content this month, focused on mentorship, career advice, getting out of your comfort zone, having your voice heard and much, much more. A special thanks to our contributing sponsors, Stacks Payments, Nuve and MAP Advisors, and to our episode sponsors, NMI, DailyPay, G&D and Ingenico. Today's special guest is Christy Duncan, the founder and CEO of Women in Payments. So, Christy, thank you so much for being here today. Welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast and, more specifically, thank you so much for participating during Women Leaders in Payments Month.
Kristy Duncan:Awesome, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Greg, thanks for having me.
Greg Myers:Absolutely so, if you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself, maybe where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
Kristy Duncan:Okay, well, I was born in Toronto and now live in Niagara-on-the-Lake, just outside Toronto. I grew up on a small hobby farm just outside Toronto, before the days of the internet, so we had to amuse ourselves and go out and play in the barn and, you know, wander in the creeks. I have two sisters, two daughters, and love to play in the payment space.
Greg Myers:Awesome. Well, before we get into the meat of the conversation, I want to do this little icebreaker kind of activity, if you don't mind, where I'm going to ask you sort of this or that question, so sort of like do you prefer early morning or late night? And then you answer and we move on quickly and get through about 10 of them. So tell me when you're ready.
Kristy Duncan:Okay, sounds fun.
Greg Myers:Okay, so do you prefer summer or winter, summer, cats or dogs, dogs, apple or Android, android, coffee or tea, tea Books or movies, books, beach or mountains, mountains, chocolate or vanilla, vanilla, texting or calling.
Kristy Duncan:Both.
Greg Myers:City or country.
Kristy Duncan:Both.
Greg Myers:And finally, pizza or pasta Pasta. All right, all right, great, that was a lot of fun. Thank you for doing that, all right. Well, right, great, that was a lot of fun. Thank you for doing that, all right. Well, let's rewind a little bit and let's talk about you and tell us about your life growing up.
Kristy Duncan:Well, that's a great question, Greg. As I mentioned, I grew up in the country on a small farm. It was just 18 acres, and as kids I had two sisters we had to really amuse ourselves. So there was no internet. There were, you know, board games, of course, but I remember in summer vacations my mother would give us breakfast, send us outside and lock the door until lunch.
Kristy Duncan:Lunch and so we had to, you know, wander around, go down to the barn and jump in the haystacks and wander down to the creek and look for minnows and pick pussy willows, that kind of stuff, and it was very idyllic in many ways. It was also quite quiet, very different from the hustle and bustle of the city, and I was often drawn to the city because I thought, wow, the big city, it looks so exciting. And as I got into university and grew up, I spent less time out in the country and more time, you know, interacting with people and learning and the excitement, and there's just so much going on in the city that I absolutely love the city as well. So that's why, when you ask if I like the city or the country, I say both, because they both have great attributes.
Greg Myers:Okay, so when you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Kristy Duncan:My grade four yearbook says I wanted to be a dentist.
Greg Myers:Nice. I guess being the founder and CEO of an organization in payments is not necessarily being a dentist. Nice, I guess being the founder and CEO of an organization in payments is not necessarily being a dentist.
Kristy Duncan:Yeah, it's funny because even in high school, when I was applying for university, I remember my application was late, so I ran down to the office to hand it in and the principal of the high school was the only one at the office at the time and he looks at it and he goes okay, so you want to take sciences? Why do you want to do this? I said, oh, because I want to go into dentistry. He said do you really want to stare in people's mouths all day, every day? I said no, but I want to make good money. And he said well, with sciences you could go into engineering. It would be so much more interesting. You get to do projects and travel and meet people and solve interesting problems. I thought, oh, yeah, I could do that. So I took the same science background and applied it to engineering and then went into banking. Who would have guessed that I'd be doing women in?
Greg Myers:payments, right, right. Well, when you were young, what was your very first job? I'll tell you mine. I ended up, I think it was before I could drive, so I think I was like 15. My mother worked at a university, a small college, and she got me the job of washing the pots and pans in the cafeteria. So that was my first paying job. What was your first job?
Kristy Duncan:I love it. Well, besides babysitting, which I think lots of kids do growing up, it looked kind of informal. My first job was not too dissimilar. I ran a halfway house on a golf course because, living in the country, it was the only job I could actually walk to. Yeah, it was fun. I cooked hot dogs and served drinks to all the people who were golfing on their you know, the halfway point of the golf course. So that was fun.
Greg Myers:Yeah, that's cool. So, as we mentioned earlier, you're the founder and CEO of Women in Payment. So, if you don't mind, walk us through your career journey and what led up to you starting it.
Kristy Duncan:Yeah, great question, greg. So I got an engineering degree and then went to work at a big bank in Canada and thought, you know, as long as they keep me interested and challenged, I will stay. And I ended up staying there for 13 years and I really, really enjoyed it. There were so many learning opportunities. I worked for some time in finance. I worked for a time in operations and got to see different parts of the bank, and then where I landed and spent the most time was in the cash management group running the product team for payables and receivables, and I loved that.
Kristy Duncan:As an engineer, I got to build things and maintain them and improve them. But it also got me out into the industry to work on some industry committees to build new things, work on some industry committees to build new things. So I was involved I'm going to date myself here as involved with putting together the EDI capabilities for banks in Canada way back when, and I worked on NACHA's cross-border council again way back when, when we were just putting together a facility to connect the domestic payments between Canada and US and Mexico.
Greg Myers:So that was really fun After time.
Kristy Duncan:I then worked for a couple years in the Treasury Department of the bank, so managing the bank's books themselves, which was kind of fun, and settling with their Bank of Canada account every day that was interesting. Managing the interest rate risk, that was very, very eye-opening and I saw a different part of the bank. But then I really found that because I love the payment space so much, I wanted to get back into that. So I ended up going on my own to consult in the payments market and I loved the work with that. Didn't love the marketing so much as the introvert that I am, but I loved the work and I really enjoyed getting out into the market to see how different organizations you know, how they were challenged and how I could help them with my expertise or do some research to help inform their strategies, and that was always really interesting. And then from there I started Women in Payments on the side of my desk.
Kristy Duncan:I thought we as women don't typically get the opportunities that men do in this industry. I saw it in spades where I worked at the bank, where I consulted in other organizations, and even when I attended conferences and industry committees, that the women were notably absent, or at least underrepresented, in all of those settings. So I thought we, as women, need to have those opportunities. And how can I? How can I make that happen? So I started Women in Payments on the side of my desk back in 2012.
Kristy Duncan:We're now going into our 13th year here in Canada and we've been growing this global community over all these years and have built a community of thousands and thousands of women and our male allies who work across the industry to help them to have career opportunities. And we do that through our conferences in each market, through networking events, through mentorship and leadership programs, through awards and recognition. We have leadership development opportunities through our various committees in each market. So it's really blossomed into a platform for women to find mentorship and camaraderie and peers across the industry and around the world. So it's been really rewarding career and always kind of with the theme of payments threading through it, which has been really fantastic.
Greg Myers:Okay, so let's talk a little more about the Women in Payments organization. If you could sort of maybe summarize a mission statement, what would you say? That is?
Kristy Duncan:Well, we have taken the time to articulate our mission, vision, purpose and values, and the mission is to offer career growth opportunities for women around the world of payments. I think we've done that pretty well. We're always open to new ways that we can do that. I think we've done that pretty well. We're always open to new ways that we can do that. Our vision is gender parity at leadership levels across payments and fintech and financial services organizations. Our purpose is to offer a safe space to promote what I call the gender agenda, and our values are those of inclusivity, empowerment, connectivity and trust. So that's what we aspire to, and it's lovely to be able to work on those and engage our community as we deliver those to the market.
Greg Myers:Okay, so obviously you are talking to women leaders all day, every day. So what are some of the biggest challenges that female leaders face?
Kristy Duncan:boils down to three main areas. So one is there's gaps that women face in our industry and in many industry, and that's a couple of ones that I'll point out. One is, of course, the gender pay gap, which I think we're all aware of, and that kind of comes in two forms. One is equal pay for work of equal value. So if you have two jobs that are just the same, then are the people in those jobs all being paid within the same range? That's reasonable and equitable for the experience they bring to that. But the other is the overall average pay for an organization, which, for you know, for men versus women, and that can be different for men versus women at an average, at an aggregate level, because two reasons One, because typically the senior, more higher paid positions tend to command a higher salary and those positions tend to be usually 70%, give or take, more men than women, so you don't have enough women in those higher paid positions. But then also because typically women aren't as well paid for the same roles when they are performing them. So that's one is the gaps being the gender pay gap, but also the authority gap that I've recently tapped into, and I love this concept because it's very true that women and men can say the same thing seriously and paid more attention to and given more credit for than women, and that's a challenge when we're delivering the same message but not getting the same reaction and the same credit for it. So we need to work on both of those in our organizations to be able to recognize and actually tap into the amazing talent that we enjoy from women across the industry.
Kristy Duncan:Another is the idea of I'm going to call them phenomena Things like we've probably many people have heard of the glass ceiling, where there's this level that women typically bump up against as they ascend in the corporate ladder and it's hard to break through that glass ceiling to get up to that CEO or C-suite a C-suite job that's. You know, in a state of, you know the organization's in a state of flux or crisis, they might put women in there because they're almost setting them up to fail and then when they do fail, or if they do fail, they say, oh well, it's a woman, she wasn't up to the task, and that's really unfair and we see that happen time and time again. The last phenomenon I want to include in this is that of the sticky floor, and that's when you look at the entry level of an organization of bringing in 50% men and 50% women. So at the entry level it is absolutely equal, but then so often the women are hesitant to put up their hands for that promotion. The men are more than happy to put up their hands, so typically the men get promoted faster. Usually it's about twice as fast or even 70% faster. So what ends up happening is women get stuck at the bottom of the organization while the men continue to ascend. So that sticky floor is another phenomenon that we struggle with.
Kristy Duncan:And the last thing I want to point out is these syndromes the imposter syndrome I think many people have heard of that. Typically women face more often than men, where we feel underconfident about our skills and our ability to deliver and it holds us back, it makes us question our abilities, it makes us hesitant to put up our hands to apply for promotions, and it's unfortunate. I think all of these things point to opportunities for our organizations to promote differently. I think we need to be reaching down proactively, reaching out to and reaching down to women to tap them on the shoulder, to encourage them to apply for roles that we think they're ready for. I think we need to be doing more mentoring and coaching to get women to be more confident in their abilities and to encourage them to get to that next level. So lots of challenges that women face. Men face challenges too, but I think these ones are typically more often faced by women.
Greg Myers:Okay, and I think you know, as we move through this podcast, there'll be topics that we talk about that will address some of those that you just mentioned, so I look forward to that. But obviously you've had a successful career. What are your guiding principles? Great question.
Kristy Duncan:I really had to think about this, greg, because I don't get this question very often. I like it. So I thought kind of three things. One is I want to be always, always adding value, so, you know, bringing my expertise to the table, to, you know, add where I can. And often I start out by just asking questions, always saying, okay, well, what is the problem we're trying to solve for here and how can I, you know, bring my previous experience to perhaps approach things differently, bring different perspectives and try to add value in those situations.
Kristy Duncan:But the other thing that I like to do and I only clued into this maybe 10 years ago as I was starting to build Women in Payments but building your network, because your network can add so much value to your career but also to other people. And it's lovely because it's this double-sided benefit where you can help others and they can help you. And I find that I network for a number of reasons. I network to find out who's who in the zoo, who does what in the industry or in an organization, and then if I have a question I know who I can ask, because clearly we can't all be omniscient and know everything. But also to find opportunities, because often your network presents opportunities to you, be they speaking opportunities, job opportunities, opportunities for learning, but also to help other people find opportunities or to find opportunities for your team or for your organization. And that network can help you do your job better.
Greg Myers:Because, oh my God, I don't know anything about.
Kristy Duncan:AI. Who can I call to get a primer or take for coffee to get a little bit of insight onto how they see AI or how they see AI impacting our industry, or what I should be looking out for in that regard? So that network can be hugely valuable for us. It can be a sounding board for when you want to bounce ideas off other people in terms of what you're doing or personal growth or industry questions, and it's just been invaluable. The last thing I would say is constant feedback.
Kristy Duncan:I'm always, always trying to get feedback from customers, from colleagues, from mentors, from people in the industry. What's going on in the industry? How can we do better? How can we add value? How can I learn? How can I do better as a leader? So that ongoing feedback, leader, so that ongoing feedback that, the constant curiosity, constant learning is always been something that I enjoy, and I remember one of my very first bosses in my on my very first summer jobs was this old she was a battle axe woman. I'm sure she's long since dead now, but she was the head cook. I had a job as an assistant cook at a lodge up in cottage country north of Toronto and I said we were cooking rice. That day I said, oh, cooking rice waters. Twice and she said, oh, I didn't know that. And she said, see, even people at my age can learn. She said I know the day I stop learning is the day I die. And I thought that's a great, great way to live life. So that's one of the things I try to live my life by.
Greg Myers:Yeah, thanks so much for sharing those, and I think throughout our careers we've all had these pivotal moments or experiences that kind of shaped our path, and they could be anything like you mentioned then, like feedback Sometimes feedback can help, sometimes job changes. I mean it could be a lot of things, but what were some of those pivotal moments or experiences that helped shape your path? Great question.
Kristy Duncan:So one story that I tell often and I'll give you an abbreviated version of it is it was actually kind of a difficult situation. I was fairly young in my career I don't know 30 years old and walked into it was fairly new in my job and I walked into a meeting with I was in the product management team and we're meeting with our IT support team and the manager of that group. I give him my business card. He goes oh Christy, I see you're an engineer. What kind of engineer are you? A household engineer, oh God. And I thought oh boy, is this what we're up against? And you know this was back in, is this what we're up against? And and you know this was back in, I guess the early 90s. And I thought, yikes, are we still dealing with this in the 90s? And that's a long time ago. So that kind of set the stage for me to realize that as women we don't get the same respect and we don't get the same recognition for our accomplishments, and so we do kind of have to fight harder and work harder and really deliver above and beyond to get the same opportunities and recognition as men do. So that was kind of a pivotal moment in my career and it taught me to really learn to believe in myself. And that's really important trying to overcome that imposter syndrome, but also being able to ask for help when we need it. And the asking for help I remember after Women in Payments.
Kristy Duncan:When I launched in Canada after a couple of years I said, ok, I want to try this in the US, but my network and industry in the US was much smaller than my Canadian network. I thought, ok, I am going to need to ask for help and as a very shy introvert, that was really hard for me. But I thought, ok, well, how can I do this? Well, I can do it in an email rather than face-to-face. That might make it easier, give people time to think about it before they respond. So I did.
Kristy Duncan:I sent out emails and I was certain they were going to say no, no, no, no, no, we don't have time for this, we can't help you, chrissy. But they all came back very supportive and very positive and I thought, oh, I can ask for help and people are happy to give it. It's not costing them anything other than a little time and sharing their networks. I thought, wow, this is like the power of the network and how we can all support and help each other. So that's been kind of a nice way that I learned from my network but also learned to pay it forward to other people and help them build their networks.
Greg Myers:Yeah, I think that's a good segue into the next topic, which is getting out of your comfort zone. So can you share an experience where you had to step out of your comfort zone to grow, and maybe what impact did that have on your professional development?
Kristy Duncan:Yeah, great question. So, yeah, I go back to that example, greg, of starting the Women in Payments in the US and trying to build and tap into that network. Because for me as an introvert, it was really hard that my comfort zone is sitting in my home office doing emails, maybe the odd conference call, but having to, you know, get up onto that stage it became a global stage was definitely beyond my comfort zone and what I found is that with practice it actually does get easier and that is wonderful. So now I'm much more comfortable I mean, I still don't love it, but I'm much more comfortable tapping into my network, getting up onto a stage, speaking to an audience, and I think that's really helped me build my career.
Greg Myers:Well, let's talk about mentorship. You mentioned it earlier. I know that's a big part of your organization, so did you? It's kind of a two-part question. Did you have mentors who influenced you? And then, how important do you think mentorship is overall to emerging leaders?
Kristy Duncan:I love that question. I think mentoring is it should be, can be a huge part of the success of a career. And I actually struggled earlier in my career because I didn't have mentors and I think part of that is because I was very shy and also partly because I was in a quite a male dominated field where the men didn't necessarily volunteer to mentor younger women, and so I struggled with that and I think that mentorship and sponsorship can play a huge and a pivotal role in helping people to learn, because so much of what we learn is not from the textbook, it's not from the manual, it's not from the corporate policy. It's learning about culture. It's learning about you know how to treat clients nicely, how to you know run a meeting effectively, how to tap into your corporate culture, and that is hugely important. We here at women in payments run a mentorship program that typically we have about two or three hundred participants every year, mentors and mentees from around the world. Our mentees are our women, our mentors are both men and women and we love to be able to share that in a formal program. We've got a whole mentorship toolkit and we run facilitation calls to get feedback and to share best practices and mentorship, I think, can occur on a number of different levels. You can have typical mentor-mentee relationship, but what I love about that is the mentor can also be mentored by the mentee, in the respect that they can learn from the mentee. They can learn about their own leadership style. They can learn about their own corporate culture. They can learn from the mentee. Whether both of those things resonate with that next generation of talent that's coming up the ranks. You know, is our corporate culture, is my leadership style appropriate and resonating and landing on this next generation? They can learn about new technology. I often learn about new technology from people younger than me because clearly I'm old school I'm not a digital native, so there's so much that we can learn.
Kristy Duncan:I also want to talk a little bit about sponsorship in this conversation, because sponsorship can be quite different from mentorship and mentors. Mentors tend to play a role of providing guidance and advice in your career, but a sponsor is someone who will actually speak up and speak on your behalf when you're not in the room, and a sponsor can put you forward for a promotion. They can put you forward for a promotion. They can put you forward for an opportunity. They can perhaps guide and coach you in getting ready for that opportunity they can.
Kristy Duncan:Sometimes I've heard of sponsors convincing people to take on an opportunity. Often when people say they're not, oh, I'm not ready for that, oh, I think you are and I'm going to coach you through that. And I'm going to coach you through the interview process and I'm going to coach you through the negotiation process and I'm going to coach you even after you're in the job on challenges that you might face, so that you don't feel like you're alone and you have no one to call when you have a big dilemma. So I think sponsorship can also play a really important and meaningful role in our careers.
Greg Myers:Thinking about this mentorship and sponsorship that you're talking about. One of the reasons that I put this show together is so that people can learn sort of what works and what doesn't. Is so that people can learn sort of what works and what doesn't. And if I'm a medium-sized company, small company, growing company maybe I don't have any kind of formal mentorship programs. How important is that to like a company? Do you feel like companies need to have a formal program or is it sort of okay that it's a more casual program? I mean to me you know, the bigger the company, the more the chances they're going to have a formal program, but I don't think that means medium and small companies can't have something. So what is your kind of view on that?
Kristy Duncan:Oh, great point, Greg. For sure we can have informal mentoring and I think we should try to mentor each other and make it constructive so it doesn't come off as criticism. But there's also another concept that I really love called I call it peer mentoring where we can actually mentor our peers and that can be really valuable as a sounding board for ideas, as a safe place to present challenges that we're facing. It could be dealing with colleagues or clients, it could be trying to manage a product or an implementation or something that we're dealing with within our work days. So I think there's so many opportunities for mentorship on a formal or an informal basis, but also even, I think, outside our organizations or even outside our industries.
Kristy Duncan:And once I heard of a woman who was at a large organization, who was volunteered for a cross-industry mentoring program.
Kristy Duncan:She thought well, you know, she was working at a big bank and she was paired with somebody at a totally different industry I don't know what it was packaged goods or something like that and she said what am I going to get out of this?
Kristy Duncan:And she said, all right, fine, and they were both at quite senior levels, I don't know SVP or so and she said, ok, well, I've been signed up, I better at least go for a coffee. And so they scheduled a coffee and she went. She said two hours later she came out of that coffee meeting and she said for the next six months they were texting back and forth because they discovered through that conversation that she was about to do a reorganization of her team and it was a fairly extensive team and she'd never done one before. But the person at the packaged goods company had, and so she was kind of getting you know, some guidance and advice from a peer in a different organization, different industry, non-competitive, on how to navigate every org and I thought, wow, what a great opportunity to learn, you know, in different ways from people who might be at our levels within our insider organizations, and we can do that as peers or as mentor to mentee. There's so many different ways that we can mentor.
Greg Myers:Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, we often don't talk much about significant failures or setbacks, so let's talk about that a little bit. Maybe can you share an instance where maybe you faced a failure or a setback, and then how did you handle it and what did you learn?
Kristy Duncan:from it one, and this is requiring me to dig deep and to get really vulnerable here. So thanks for that, greg. I had gosh. It was 2014, 2015, so 10 years ago. I had a life situation which really changed the course of my life significantly and I had gone to south kore my at the time husband. He got a big promotion and was posted there and we took the whole family there. It was this great Asian adventure and his contract was for three years and it was all very exciting, and a year into it, for a whole bunch of reasons, we decided to get divorced and that was a really big life changing moment for me.
Kristy Duncan:And I came back to Canada. I felt very, very alone, but I also had had to structure my life. I was not allowed to earn income when I was living in Korea, so I had kind of taken my job over there. So I had kind of taken my job over there, but it was still very small. My business and I came back to Canada without my family and had to rebuild my life and my career basically from scratch, and that was a huge setback.
Kristy Duncan:I felt very, very much like a failure. I failed my marriage. It was actually my second marriage and, you know, looking deep within myself. But what came out of that for me was a whole bunch of resolve and resilience and hard work and grit and the need to dig deep and believe in myself. And I worked like a dog for five years 70-hour weeks for five years until I could build this company Women in Payments to the point where I could build a team to support me and build out this company and our global community. And you know, now I feel I finally got to a point where I'm not working 70 hour weeks anymore Yay and I'm actually able to take some time to start writing. I've got four books dancing in the back of my head, which is really exciting, so that was something that you know. It also forced me to dig deep into my network and ask for help, and it was a real life-changing, pivotal point in my life. So thank you for asking.
Greg Myers:No, thank you for sharing that, and obviously those 70 hours for all those years has paid off because you've built quite the organization.
Kristy Duncan:Thank you, thank you.
Greg Myers:Yeah. So I asked this question in all of my interviews, not just during the Women Leaders in Payments Month, because I think everyone brings it kind of their own unique experience to the answer. And it's, let's say, young woman's coming right out of college. She's interested in payments or FinTech and she sees it as a great industry to be in. What advice would you give her coming right out of college to help her to be successful?
Kristy Duncan:Well, yay that we've got women coming into FinTech and this industry, because it's a fabulous, exciting, dynamic industry and I'm so glad I'm in it and I think for young women coming into this there's so much opportunity. So what I would say is number one continuous learning. We learn so much in college and there's such value in our education, education but there's lots, lots more that we need to learn and we'll need to keep learning as we travel our careers in in this industry. So definitely, continuous learning, that curiosity, the endless curiosity. Ask questions and when you've asked 10 questions, ask 10 more, dig deep, because you learn by asking questions and making mistakes.
Kristy Duncan:I remember when I was learning to speak German. I worked in Germany as a summer student in university one year and at the end of the summer I said you know what? I've made so many mistakes. I've learned a lot. So, asking questions, making mistakes Don't be afraid of making mistakes.
Kristy Duncan:That would be my number one is the continuous learning.
Kristy Duncan:My number two would be to find a mentor, or even perhaps a peer mentor group who can guide you and give advice and help you navigate your organization, navigate the industry, point you to places where you can meet other people and learn and really grow within this industry.
Kristy Duncan:And that kind of dovetails in with my third piece of advice, which would be to build your network. And we can build our network in so many ways, certainly the people we deal with day to day, but we can build it across the organization by, you know, going to people in other departments and saying, hey, you know, I'm really curious about what you do. Do you mind if we go for coffee and you can tell me a little bit more so I can be more effective and perhaps support your department or your role in a better way? Or I'm curious to know what your role or your department does, so that I can help understand this organization and plan my career. Or learning about what people do in other parts of the industry, so that you get a bigger picture of how it all fits together. So building that network, I think, is really key. That'd be my third piece of advice.
Greg Myers:Yeah, I think all three are spot on and great advice, so thank you so much for sharing that. Well, christy, let's wrap up with this one final question who or what inspires you to keep pushing forward in your career and your job and growing? The Women in Payments organization.
Kristy Duncan:Thanks for that question.
Kristy Duncan:So two answers I have, if I may.
Kristy Duncan:One is the global community of women and our male allies that I have had the absolute privilege and honor of meeting and serving over the years, and I go around the world of payments quite literally a couple of times every year and get such a fabulous opportunity to meet them and learn from them and be inspired by them.
Kristy Duncan:It's just so wonderful, and anything I can give back to the community, I'm very happy to do so. The second group that pushes me forward and inspires me is my two daughters and watching them build their careers, and it's funny. I used to feel so guilty about not spending enough time with them and not being home for them, and as much as I would like to, but I told one of my daughters that just six months ago she said mom, no, no, don't feel guilty, because what you did was you taught us to follow our passions, you inspired us and showed us that you can do great things if you follow your passion, and so I now feel much better about not spending enough time with my daughters when they were growing up and feel like I was able to be a role model for them to build their own careers and follow their passions.
Greg Myers:Great, well thank you so much for sharing that, and Christy, this has been an amazing episode. I just want to thank you so much for sharing that, and Christy, this has been an amazing episode. I just want to thank you so much for being on the show. I know your time is super valuable, so thank you so much for being here today.
Kristy Duncan:Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. Thanks for the opportunity, Greg. It was a wonderful discussion.
Greg Myers:Thank you so much. You are so welcome, and to all you listeners out there, I thank you for your time as well, and until the next story. A special thanks to our sponsors for helping make this month possible, especially our contributing sponsors, stacks Payments, nuve and Map Advisors, and to our episode sponsors NMI, daily Pay, gnd and Ingenico. To learn more, visit wwwleadersinpaymentscom.