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Leaders In Payments
Leaders In Payments
Women Leaders in Payments: Margaret Weichert, Chief Product Officer at The Clearing House | Episode 344
What if you could tap into the mind of a key player in the payments industry and learn the secrets behind managing $2 trillion in daily transactions? Join us for a compelling conversation with Margaret Weichert, Chief Product Officer at The Clearing House, as she takes us through her inspiring journey from upstate New York and Georgetown University to the helm of one of the most significant institutions in the financial world. Margaret shares her rich background and reveals how her upbringing and education paved the way for her impactful career.
Margaret's expertise shines through as she discusses the complexities of leadership and team dynamics, offering valuable insights into effective communication and decision-making. She candidly addresses the unique challenges faced by female leaders, including strategies to navigate unconscious biases in the workplace. Listen to Margaret recount her bold transition from the payments industry to a political role within the US federal government, where she learned crucial lessons in governance and service that profoundly impact her current role in a not-for-profit organization.
The episode wraps up with a focus on the importance of mentorship in the payments industry. Margaret emphasizes the significance of building lasting, mutually beneficial relationships and provides practical advice for newcomers. Margaret’s candid reflections and expert advice offer a rich narrative that will resonate with anyone interested in leadership, mentorship, and the evolving world of payments. Don't miss this opportunity to gain valuable insights from a true leader in the field.
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. As we continue our month dedicated to women leaders and payments today, I welcome Margaret Weikert, the Chief Product Officer at the Clearinghouse. We've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Clearinghouse, we've got a great episode ahead, so let's get started. Hi, margaret, thank you for being here and welcome to the Leaders in Payments podcast and, more specifically, thank you for participating during Women Leaders in Payments Month.
Margaret:Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Greg:Absolutely so. If you don't mind, tell our audience a little bit about yourself where you grew up, where you went to school, where you currently live, a few things like that.
Margaret:So I grew up in upstate New York, just outside of Albany, new York, and left at age 17 to go to Georgetown University. It was really exciting to be in a big city, in the nation's capital, and at that time I thought I wanted to be a foreign service officer Capitol. And at that time I thought I wanted to be a foreign service officer. So I studied at the School of Foreign Service and I really loved it. That is not what I went on to do, although I've done a fair amount of work internationally and through the course of the next, I guess, almost 40 years I've lived in four countries, six states. I currently live between Northern Virginia and New York City. I work in New York City and then I have a home in Northern Virginia.
Greg:Okay, great, so tell us about your role today and a little about the Clearinghouse.
Margaret:Sure, so I am the chief product officer at the Clearinghouse.
Margaret:Sure, so I am the chief product officer at the Clearinghouse.
Margaret:And the Clearinghouse is a storied but little known 170-year-old institution that processes payments for hundreds of millions of Americans. Today we process about $2 trillion a day in US dollar payments, and we do that on a wire system called CHIPS, a check image clearing system called SVP Co. We have an automated clearinghouse payment system called EPN, and we were the pioneers in US dollar instant payments with our real-time payment system. So I, as the chief product officer, am responsible for growing, maintaining and connecting these products to clients. The Clearinghouse is owned by a number of US-based US dollar clearing banks, as well as some international US dollar clearing banks, but we serve institutions big and small, so we have clients like Navy Federal Credit Union, small community banks like Cape Cod Community Bank, as well as large banks like JPMorgan Chase, wells Fargo, us Bank, bank of America, and I get to work with those clients to really understand what their payments needs are and how we serve the needs both of the banks themselves but also their customers, whether they're businesses, consumers or governments.
Greg:Okay, well, before we get into the meat of the conversation, I'd like to do a little icebreaker exercise where I'm going to ask you a this or that type question, so something like do you prefer early morning versus late night? And you just give me the quick answer and we go on to the next one, and we have 10 of them to go through, so tell me when you're ready.
Margaret:All right, this will be fun. Do you prefer summer or winter? Oh, that's hard Winter.
Greg:Cats or dogs.
Margaret:Dogs.
Greg:Apple or Android.
Margaret:Oh, that's tricky Apple.
Greg:Coffee or tea, coffee Books or movies, books, beach or mountains.
Margaret:Mountains.
Greg:Chocolate or vanilla.
Margaret:Also tough Vanilla.
Greg:Texting or calling. Texting the city or the country.
Margaret:Depends, but I'll say city.
Greg:Okay, and the last one do you prefer pizza or pasta? Oh, pizza, okay, great, I had pizza last night. All right, thanks for doing that. That was fun. So let's move on. Let's talk a little bit about you and your life. So tell us about your life growing up.
Margaret:I was thinking about this recently. So I am the middle child of three and my brother is what's called an Irish twin, which means he's 11 months older than me. We were born in the same year and I have a sister who's four years younger than me and I think something really important formed because I had this brother right in front of me. I wanted to keep up with him and so you know, I wanted to climb the trees he climbed, I wanted to play the games like that. But it was a community where everybody knew one another. I went to the same high school, my mother went to the girls, I went to high school with their moms, went to the same high school, and that's part of why I left Albany after I graduated from high school. It felt too small at that time but it was a lovely, in some ways idyllic place and time to grow up, because it was very safe. The community was very tight-knit. It was probably a good base for just becoming secure in what I wanted to do.
Greg:Okay, and when you were young? What did you want to be when you grew up?
Margaret:It's interesting I wanted to be a doctor and the reason I wanted to be a doctor? Most of the women who did work that I knew were nurses or teachers and I thought you know, a smart, go-getter young woman should want to be a doctor. When I was writing my college essays for pre-med and not really connecting with what I was saying, I kind of had a sense of like, hmm, not sure that's really what I want to do. And when I was writing my essay for Georgetown School of Foreign Service, I actually believed what I was writing, which was about being of service and doing things in the wider world that made a difference in people's lives, not on their bodies, but more in how they got along with each other. So I think, although that's not precisely what I've gone and done, there's a lot more aligned with that orientation than what I was thinking when I was, you know, 16, 17.
Margaret:Gotcha, you know, ironically, I've asked this question a lot and no one has said that they wanted to grow up and be in payments so I find that funny, want to do five, 10 years from now. It's interesting because I have done a lot of strategy roles where you think five, 10 years out and even the kind of strategy I do today very much would say nobody knows actually what it's going to be like five, 10 years from now in any kind of precise way. But we know more generally what things will be like. So build in the optionality in your career so you're well positioned for the general trends as opposed to a specific. I want this particular job or I want this particular career path because most of the really compelling things that have been opportunities in my life were not things I could have conceived of until they were presented to me, but I had done things that made me present and available to accept those kind of opportunities when they came in.
Greg:Well, when you were younger, what was your very first job?
Margaret:So my very first job was working for the New York State I don't even know, I think it was the Department of Prisons doing payroll entry or something like I was a decent typist, so it leveraged those skills and it was a good experience just seeing what office politics were like. New York State had unions even for office workers, and because I was a summer employee I wasn't technically part of the union but it was a closed shop so everybody had to behave like they were part of the union and so I got in trouble for working through breaks and things like that.
Margaret:Because I was like I don't want to, you know, like around.
Greg:Right right.
Margaret:I was working and I learned like no, you don't do that, you got to go take your break Right.
Greg:All right. So maybe let's connect the dots between when you graduated from college and kind of where you are today. Maybe walk us through your career journey a little bit.
Margaret:Sure. So it's not a very straight line, but to me the through line throughout my career has been working to solve complex business problems that maybe are less glamorous than other people might be interested in. So I worked in a firm after I graduated from. I went from college to graduate school and then went into a consulting firm that did development economic consulting to organizations like USAID, world Bank, things like that, and I worked on energy economic issues, not because that was what I specifically wanted to do, but because it was of the 40 some odd resumes I sent out and cover letters and all of that. It was the job I got, and probably not surprisingly, it was a job I got because someone in my network from college connected me to an opportunity with their husband's firm. So it was part of a networking activity where I got my first job.
Margaret:And the most important thing about my first job was just learning how to dig deep and gain an appreciation for what I was doing, and I think that's the most important thing as a skill to cultivate for young people is develop a deep regard for the importance of what you're doing. Why does it matter? There's so many jobs where you know you tell your mom and she doesn't have any idea what you do, but somebody cares about what I'm doing. Why do they care? Where does this add value? And to me, that was maybe the biggest learning about what I did in my first job, which was helping create the economic analysis that would enable people who are giving out money to developing countries to make good investment decisions about where to spend that money.
Margaret:I had a lot of experiences trying to make a difference in economic development, and that took me to Nicaragua where I worked on a not-for-profit, and my biggest learning there was good intentions and a few kind of college-based skills weren't enough to make a good difference in economic development, and really what I got an appreciation of was the payment systems and the financial systems in the US are fundamental to the economic development that we've seen in the United States, and so I went and got a finance degree because I realized good intentions don't solve a lot of problem without good financial systems.
Margaret:And if you think about a lot of people think about credit cards, for example, as like somehow inherently bad but when you think about the number of small businesses that essentially got financing through a consumer credit card, you know to get started in a business that's really powerful, and so I ended up doing consulting out of business school and wanted to work in financial services, did a number of projects for Visa and fell in love with payments and I've essentially worked in more or less every aspect of payments in the last 30 years as a result of kind of a series of steps that were about creating economic opportunity, economic growth.
Margaret:And how I've been able to have an impact wasn't my initial vision, but probably 25 years later I ended up doing some consulting for the World Bank. I ended up doing some consulting for the World Bank and the Gates Foundation on how mobile payments were transforming economic development in Africa and around the world. So I've kind of now got some skills that actually are useful to my original idea of driving economic development in other countries economic development in other countries. But I've spent most of my career focused on economic development and facilitating the movement of money in the US economy, which is critical to growth.
Greg:Okay, and that brings us up until today. So obviously you've been successful throughout your career, so what are some of your guiding principles?
Margaret:So to me, I want to have an appreciation for the values of a company and an organization that I work for. I want to have a sense that I can actually add value to whatever that mission is, that I can be of service to other people on the team and to the customers in that market segment. And then I mentioned earlier the notion of optionality. Whatever I'm doing, I want to feel is enabling me to learn and to grow and develop skills that will be relevant both now and in the future. And it doesn't matter that I've been in the workforce for quite a long time. I still need to develop and grow because the world I worked in in some of my early jobs, when I was doing data entry for the New York State Department of Correction, there were no computers. I was literally typing in data from paper-written time cards into tally sheets. And some years later there were computers, but they were very low functionality. I used Borland it was a spreadsheet that wasn't Excel, it was some other spreadsheet, predating and I used WordPerfect, which predated.
Greg:I remember that.
Margaret:So the skills that I would need, even the skills today to get into Zencaster, need you know, even the skills today to you know, get into Zencaster. You know those are skills.
Greg:I didn't have two hours ago, right, always learning.
Margaret:So I think to me that that's an important element in any role that I've taken.
Greg:Okay, well, let's talk about your journey to becoming a leader. Were there any pivotal moments, or can you share any stories around pivotal moments or experiences that helped shape your path?
Margaret:as opposed to management is about recognizing the importance of stewardship to the organization and to the team, and what my responsibilities are as opposed to what I am going to get from them. And I think probably one of the most powerful experiences I had was I was working at Bank of America and we were working on a project that related to physical paper cash. So a lot of people even 15 years ago were saying, oh well, cash is going away, we don't need to think about cash. And when we actually looked at the data, we discovered cash withdrawals among our customers were actually going up, not down, and we did a huge amount of work to really understand what was going on with cash. And turns out, it was driven by a number of fundamental factors, including the people becoming banked were more likely to be cash users, and there were some other things around. People working as hourly employees in the service industry were more likely to not have direct deposit. They ended up having more cash needs and we ended up pulling probably about 100 people into some work that was not intuitive to most of those people Like why are we working on cash? You know, what do we need to do with this information?
Margaret:And there were a lot of team dynamics that were really challenging and for me as a leader, I really needed to understand to really understand some of our team dynamic and understanding things that made total sense to me how they were landing with some of my teammates when I said them.
Margaret:With some of my teammates when I said them, you know, if you're the boss and you say X, Y and Z, and you mean X and they hear D, you're going to have a big disconnect.
Margaret:And I had to learn a lot about how did I communicate and how I could bring people along with things that seemed so clear to me but were totally unclear to them.
Margaret:And then also understanding I was willing to act and make decisions with less data than some people wanted to have, and so they felt really exposed and they needed me to give them confidence that they could make a decision with less data and that would be okay and I would take accountability if something went wrong. So for me, that was a long-winded way of saying for me, leadership really is about what do I need to give to my team so they can perform, to give to my team so they can perform, and that, honestly, was something I didn't really understand about leadership and once I did, seeing how my team performed was so fulfilling that that is actually something I've focused a lot on in my career since then is how do I actually give teams what they need to be, you know, high performing teams. So it's not about me and my ideas. It's really about me creating an environment for my teammates to do amazing things.
Greg:So obviously you know we're talking about leadership and success, but along with having a career in any profession comes challenges. So what were some of the biggest challenges you faced as a female leader and how did you overcome them?
Margaret:You know some of the challenges of leadership are the same.
Margaret:I think, the unique challenges I think of being a female leader.
Margaret:I saw a lot when I was advocating for, particularly in environments that are up or out like consulting, advocacy for people is really an important part of what you owe your team and to the extent there is a old boys network that affects outcomes in performance achievement and whether it's compensation or promotions or things of that nature.
Margaret:Having a seat at the table and an equal voice is difficult when you've got some of these subjective possibly biased. You know, like human bias, not having an untoward bias, but just people sampling on. You know the people who have been successful here looked like this, acted like this. You know the people who have been successful here looked like this, acted like this. You know those unconscious biases may affect what happens in performance management and, as a female leader, trying to appropriately identify when that's happening and call it out in a way that does not result in an adverse outcome, because when you're dealing with performance you don't want to make a diversity and inclusion point but actually hurt the people you're trying to advocate for. And so that's been a learning how to deal with unconscious bias, both in myself and others, in a way that doesn't become such a cause, celeb, that it actually hurts the people you're trying to help.
Greg:Okay, so let's switch gears a little bit and talk about getting out of your comfort zone. Can you share an experience where you've had to step out of your comfort zone to help you grow, and what impact did that have on your professional development?
Margaret:Yeah. So I didn't do it for the purpose of growth. I think growth was an outcome. But I surprised myself and probably many others by stepping out of kind of a payments role and going to work for the US federal government in a capacity that totally aligned with the skills I have around problem solving in complex business environments. But it was in a political context and I was very uncomfortable with some aspects of that political context. I hold a set of political beliefs that are personal. They're not.
Margaret:Even though my family actually in Albany, new York, was deeply involved in state politics, I purposely chose not to have a career in that realm and so in deciding to do that job, I really thought about some of those guiding principles I mentioned earlier. Can I be of service? And as a citizen in my country, do I have an obligation if called to serve? And I decided I did and I had to really get clear in serving that. I was there as an instrument of a democratic process that elects presidents every four years and the presidents lead, you know this big bureaucracy and I was helping manage the big bureaucracy. I was the deputy director for management in the executive office of the president, which is effectively the chief operating officer of the federal government, and so I had to be of service to the American people and to the federal employees as well. As you know, help execute the will of the American people as expressed in the elections.
Margaret:Help execute the will of the American people as expressed in the elections and my own personal opinions were not the thing that was most important. You know, the outcome of the elections were the thing that was most important and the complying with the rule of law and things of that nature, and it was a very useful experience to get clarity about what our government was designed to do and what it wasn't designed to do. You know our government wasn't designed to be super efficient. It was designed to prevent tyranny. So operating in that operating environment was a good reminder of the role of governance and that it's actually quite interesting in the role I'm in now.
Margaret:We are a not-for-profit organization governed by our owner banks, who are 22 commercial competitors to each other, so we have a lot of very interesting governance in my job today, and I think that government experience gave me a healthy appreciation for governance really being important to what is my job and what is my role in a corporation If I'm working for a private sector company, shareholder. Value creation is first and foremost, you know, in the government. It's about, you know, executing the will of the American people as expressed in elections. And, where I am today, it's about creating value for, essentially, the payments industry and the US economy through this vehicle that's owned by banks. So that was unexpected, but very good learning.
Greg:So you've worked across nonprofits, for-profit businesses and the government, so you've covered it all yeah.
Margaret:Yeah, and I've worked for privately held profits as well as publicly traded and there's definite differences in each of those. And you know I started my own company, you know, way back in the day, and you know we were VC backed and and you know your governance in that environment is also different and there's not, in my view, sort of a moral one is better than the other it's. You know, it's my job as a manager and a leader to really understand for this entity that I am serving you know, how am I really helping them achieve their objectives, given their governance?
Greg:Well, let's talk a little bit about mentorship. So did you have mentors who influenced your career? That's kind of the first part of the question, and then second part is how important do you think mentorship is for emerging leaders?
Margaret:Yeah, so I've had a number of mentors, whether they would have said they were mentors or not the mix of lines of coaches and bosses and mentors. I think one of my best early mentors and she continues to this day to be a mentor is my aunt. I worked in an unpaid internship at an organization that my aunt ran. It was Levi's Men's Jeans. It was a commercial entity, and she gave me a lot of unsolicited feedback because she wanted to make sure I didn't embarrass her, so she gave me some of the best advice about how to ensure, when I'm meeting with someone more senior, I don't waste their time, and I got that coaching when I was probably 19 years old and it has stood me in very good stead about, you know, having an agenda and thinking about how do I get what I need in a way that is easiest and most time efficient for the person I'm asking for something from. You know now she's been a director on a number of boards. You know she's always pushing me to ensure my board resume is ready, and so she's been a great mentor.
Margaret:I had a boss who we hired in to my startup when we were looking to sell the company. We brought in a professional CEO and she's been a mentor throughout my career and whenever I had challenging interpersonal considerations and even some like work-life balance considerations. She, like me, was a professional who was also a single mother of two boys. So we had a lot of experiences of how do you manage some of those things, and I've also had a number of really important bosses and former bosses who I've been able to turn to throughout my career for coaching and advice and recommendations when I was interviewing for new jobs, and there's a richness in a long shared experience with people who have known you and seen you grow. So it's something I've really appreciated and I try to give back. There are people I've worked with 10, 15 years ago that when I connect with them, now doing these interviews about mentorship.
Greg:I think and this maybe is a comment towards more the younger people that might's more casual. So you don't have to think of mentorship as this like structured program where I have to speak to them, you know, once a month or once a quarter or you know anything like that. I think that's one thing that I think people hopefully they can take away from you know this month's worth of content that we're creating is that mentorship doesn't have to be this formal program that you know your company has. You can take on ownership of mentorship and it doesn't have to be so formal. What do you think about that?
Margaret:Oh, I totally agree. I believe mentorship programs are good, particularly for people who find it a personal challenge to reach out to people, so it may remove, you know, a barrier to entry for people to feel what does a mentor relationship feel like? And then I would encourage people to seek to cultivate that, because the elements of it are a give and take and an ongoing relationship. And you can give and take by buying coffee for someone. If there's someone who they have something that you think you would love to learn about, it's an experience or a job or a way of managing their life that they have something that you would like to develop. Building a relationship that allows you to ask but also allows them to storytell, I think is super helpful and even in answering the question I was thinking about helpful. And even in answering the question I was thinking about what I wanted or what I needed has varied throughout my career. When I was young, I didn't know what I needed and I didn't even know what other than the best job or more money or whatever. When I was young, I didn't know what to want, but the more I worked and faced my own challenges, the more I could see. This woman has been through challenge and dealt with it with grace, or this man always has a positive attitude and gets stuff done. I want that. Or this woman has life circumstances that look like mine and she doesn't look like she's struggling, like I feel like I'm struggling. I want to know what she knows, and that, I think, is the thing is.
Margaret:It's about relationships and it's also about understanding what do I need or what is it time for, and to me a lot of the. You know you don't eat the elephant all in one day. That's probably an inappropriate analogy, but you see what's right in front of you. What do I need today? And that is I think it's possibly a little hard when you're young to not want to eat the whole thing. I want to know it all right now and to me, the learning to be more present to what's right in front of me has been one of those lessons that I really appreciate. That is a fulfilling lesson of my life. The more I focus on what's in front of me, nearer in both, the better I am at what I'm doing and the more I will see what might be at the horizon. But I'm not worried about stuff that's way, way out there.
Greg:Right, it makes perfect sense. So let's use this scenario. Maybe a young woman has just graduated from college, or maybe she's early in her career and she comes to you and says Margaret, I'm interested in going into the payments industry. It looks like an exciting industry, so I want to build a career in payments or fintech. What advice would you give her to be successful?
Margaret:A couple of things. One, I would say that you're not afraid of technology. Not afraid of technology and what I mean by that is fundamentally payments is about networks and technologies that move money, and understanding the nature of the technologies that historically have dealt with payments and some of the things that may change how we deal with payments going forward. We don't, in payments, need to know at kind of the code level or the machine level exactly how things work, but we need to know from a process standpoint, how do these businesses work.
Margaret:So, starting with the technologies that you use today, like seek to understand how does the money move if you send a Zelle payment? How does the money move if you send a bill payment? You don't need to know what kind of IBM mainframe is involved or anything like that, but do you understand the technology players who are in the middle of that? And that's what I mean about not being afraid of technology. To understand payments, you need to understand kind of that end-to-end flow from a customer perspective and so really think about you know, when you go and tap your card or your phone at the coffee shop down the street, do you understand anything about what that merchant is going through and where that signal goes? When you tap your phone and on that reader, what happens next? Do you understand that?
Margaret:And to not be afraid, there are resources out there. You know Visa's website has a lot of really good information about how that works in the credit card system. Our website, the Clearinghouse, has information about how our payment systems work. There are a lot of resources. I'm sure Women in Payments has resources. There are a lot of organizations that have resources about how money moves and I would encourage a young person who wants to get into the payments industry to actually take advantage and don't be afraid of the technology, because at the end of the day, the technology serves the customers and if you can understand the flow from a customer standpoint both a consumer and also the business like a merchant or a bank how that works, you'll be well set to work in payments.
Greg:I think that's some great advice. Well, let's wrap up with one final question who or what inspires you to keep pushing forward in your career?
Margaret:So I think I'm still inspired by the notion that what I do ultimately helps human beings achieve their economic dreams. You know that what I do matters to people I think about. You know a lot of people think checks are dead and I've talked to a lot of people who work on our team and are worried that we don't care about the folks on our team who work on check image clearing. And I tell them a story that is a very recent story. My mom has dementia. She's in a. We've recently moved her to memory care and we have a couple women who come and just visit with her and do some activities with her, take her out to lunch, and I have tried to figure out how I can get them paid electronically and they're not taking it. They're just wanting checks and they, I think, have different reasons for why they want checks.
Margaret:But I write checks and I write checks not because of what I want. I write checks because they want them and they are valuable to my mother and because of that there is no payment solution that I can force on them that changes what they want and what really matters is that these wonderful women who help my mother feel like she's a normal part of society get what they need, get what they need. And so, at the end of the day, the thing that really inspires me is the actual human element and the value created around the payment system. It's how my dry cleaner stays in business during the pandemic when nobody needs dry cleaning services the pandemic when nobody needs dry cleaning services Economically. How do payment systems help or hurt the people who use them? So for me, that continues to inspire. I continue to look to really understand the human elements or the business elements associated with what I do, what I do and I want to enable in our payment system, you know, efficient, effective, useful payment systems to exist for as long as people need them.
Greg:I think that is a great way to wrap up the show. So, Margaret, thank you so much for being on today. I know your time is very valuable, so I really appreciate you coming on sharing your experiences and stories. I really appreciate it.
Margaret:Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Greg: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, g&d and Ingenico. To learn more, visit wwwleadersinpaymentscom.