The founders of Alloy, a software company that helps banks and fintechs make faster onboarding decisions, have made a commitment to hiring and supporting a diverse employee base.
More than half of Alloy's employees are women, and nearly 40% are minorities.
Such diversity is by design. Efforts to promote inclusion extend beyond hiring to include dramatic changes in the way meetings are conducted, the diversity metrics gathered and presented to the board, and even the use of software to ensure gender-neutral language in job descriptions.
Those efforts helped Alloy land the fifth spot on American Banker’s list of the
“We did not feel the constraints of a traditional white male-oriented industry,” said Laura Spiekerman, the New York company's co-founder and chief revenue officer.
The road to diversity started with Spiekerman, who founded Alloy with CEO Tommy Nicholas and Charles Hearn, the company's chief technology officer.
“At the very beginning, I was the only woman among seven or eight people,” Spiekerman said.
As female job candidates noticed more women in the office during interviews, their ranks grew.
To help women in fintech build stronger ties, including those at other companies, Spiekerman co-hosts cocktail hours with Zoe Chaves of the payment app Splitwise at Money20/20 events. Spiekerman also attended monthly dinners organized by Nicky Goulimis, co-founder and chief operating officer of the cross-border credit scoring company Nova Credit.
“This is what men do all the time," Spiekerman said. "When you want to raise your next round, you talk to your other founder friend and he has 10 investors he can introduce you to. Women are less connected naturally and we don’t have those built-in advantages, so it’s really important for us to create our own networks.”
Laurel Farrer, CEO of Distribute Consulting, a management consulting firm in Granby, Conn., that specializes in telework, suggests several ways companies can demonstrate genuine dedication to diversity and inclusion in the workplace: be transparent about their metrics and initiatives to enhance inclusion, hold unconscious-bias trainings that cover all kinds of diversity and actively recruit from ZIP codes with a high density of candidates the company aspires to recruit.
Alloy has taken some of these steps to broaden its base. It hired two diversity and inclusion consultants who provide weekly updates as they uncover barriers to hiring, compensating and providing a positive experience for a diverse workforce.
A workshop in October about inclusive leadership was the company's best-attended meeting ever, with 98% participation. Job descriptions are passed through a tool called Textio to make the language more inclusive and gender-neutral, and executives analyze each stage of the candidate process to determine why people might be dropping out.
Alloy executives also report diversity metrics to the company’s board, even though they aren’t required to do so.
“We think they should hold us accountable,” said Spiekerman.
Alloy raised raised $40 million in Series B funding in September that will be used to bolster its sales and marketing teams and, over the longer term, extend its decisioning technology to transactions that occur after the initial onboarding.
John Meyer, senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, said Alloy differentiates itself with application programming interfaces that let customers plug into best-of-breed solutions, such as identity verification software from Socure, and with its partnerships with the digital account origination companies Mantl and Narmi.
As head count increases, new employees will have a chance to shape company culture. Spiekerman said she and her co-founders are always learning.
For example, engineering manager Jeff Csicsek revamped the weekly all-hands meetings several years ago. As the company grew, having everyone sit in a circle to discuss their work became unwieldy. He surveyed colleagues about what they wanted to take away from the meetings and prepared slides with clip art titled “All Hands Live!” to channel a talk show. In the goofiest meeting that Spiekerman can remember, the team welcomed a new solutions architect by dimming the lights and holding candles as if it were a seance.
But over time, Csicsek realized that these meetings were too dependent on inside jokes. He set out to make them more inclusive by emphasizing small-group activities, conducting short, informal interviews with new employees in a segment called Eager Beavers — a homage to early iterations of Csicsek’s meetings when he dressed in a beaver suit — and highlighting upcoming company events.
All-hands meetings take place virtually these days, with breakout room activities becoming a staple. In one of the team’s favorite meetings, everyone wore bank-holdup-style masks — not COVID-era face coverings — and concocted strategies for defrauding a bank that used Alloy for know-your-customer checks.
“It was pretty wild to see a ton of faces on Zoom with robber masks on,” Spiekerman said.
