The payments industry has steadily expanded its ranks of women in the last decade, but its image as a man's world remains intact, according to Kim Fitzsimmons, who stands out as one of the rare female chiefs of a payments company.
“We’ve made a lot of progress, but it’s a fact that payments is still a male-dominated industry because of its emphasis on technology and its heritage in hardware and software,” said Fitzsimmons, CEO of Talus Pay, a Dallas-based payments processing firm.
Fitzsimmons provided advice on how women can break through barriers and rise to leadership positions during a session at American Banker's Payments Forum in Arizona last week, where she was honored as one of this year's
“It starts with getting out of your comfort zone,” Fitzsimmons said, explaining how her career in the payments industry began a few decades ago.
Armed with a business degree but lacking a job, Fitzsimmons responded to a classified ad in the newspaper and got hired. But when she was told to appear at sales training on a Saturday morning at a motel, initially she backed out.
“I was horrified,” Fitzsimmons said, explaining that the lowly sounding training program for selling gasoline-station payments acceptance didn’t suit her lofty visions of becoming a corporate executive.
After a couple of weeks of unemployment, she reconsidered and went to that training session, where she eventually rose up the ranks selling payment services to companies around the world.
Fitzsimmons later became an executive vice president at First Data (now Fiserv) and was named CEO of Cynergy Data before moving to JPMorgan Chase, where she was U.S. president of merchant services. Talus Pay hired her as CEO in July 2020.
Today Fitzsimmons reaches out to mentor other employees, especially younger women. One of the lessons she aims to impart is how her own lack of technical expertise didn’t prevent her from moving up in payments organizations.
“I think the technical slant of payments might keep a lot of women out of the industry, but I was the least technically oriented person at first and it didn’t hold me back,” she said.
Early on, Fitzsimmons realized that she'd have to step off the basic career path if she wanted to advance.
“I wasn’t even the top producer on the sales team, but I wanted to lead rather than being part of the crowd so I resigned,” she recalled.
Immediately her boss’s boss called Fitzsimmons to see why she was leaving. When she told him she wanted to be in management, he created a position to keep her at the company.
The mentoring he provided consisted primarily of giving her responsibilities with more management challenges.
“I never got any one-on-one executive coaching, so when I wanted to move up again I hired a personal coach who told me all kinds of things I’d never known about refining my tone, how to present my ideas at the table, how to act in the boardroom and carry myself,” she said.
I think the technical slant of payments might keep a lot of women out of the industry, but I was the least technically-oriented person at first and it didn’t hold me back.
Fitzsimmons always pushes herself to learn as much of the technical side of the business as she needs, giving her insight into operations and finance that has opened up further opportunities for herself and her direct reports.
“Don’t stay in the same role for three years just because you feel comfortable there — push yourself, even if it’s a lateral move to another department. That’s how you validate things and elevate your earning potential,” she said.
In payments, as with other industries, diverse perspectives are important for organizations to succeed, and Fitzsimmons said she never felt unwelcomed when she invited herself into a discussion, even if she was the only woman.
“When men went into the corners of a room to talk about golf and sports, and women went into their own groups, I stayed wherever the important conversations were happening. I always watched ESPN so I could be part of whatever the men were talking about,” she said.
As Fitzsimmons rose up higher in payments organizations, she began to discover big disparities between how much men and women were earning.
“The compensation was sometimes dramatically different, and I think that sadly it’s very common that what women and men are earning in payments is very lopsided,” she said.
Solving pay inequities is hard — even as corporations adopt broader transparency about salaries, certain jobs in the payments industry carry heavier responsibilities and require more experience, leading to higher salaries for different individuals, Fitzsimmons said.
“Women need to be aware of the fact that they can earn more and they need to be constantly thinking about moving up and not getting stagnant in the same role year after year," she said.
While many women still aren’t as attracted to studying math and technology, Fitzsimmons says a background in business is a great start for those who want to get into the payments industry.
“My daughter started out wanting to be a fourth-grade teacher, but I had a lot of frank discussions over the years with her and now she has an MBA from Penn and she’s an organizational change expert. I get a lot of free executive coaching from her,” Fitzsimmons said.
Another thing Fitzsimmons learned is there is no easy way to balance a career and a family, when women are still the only ones who must interrupt their careers to physically recover from giving birth.
“I tell women they shouldn’t pass up having children if they want a family and a career, but you need to be strategic about it. When my kids were young I took jobs where there wasn’t a lot of travel required. You also need to have a great partner,” she said.
One of the upsides of the pandemic’s shift to remote work was that it illuminated both the tasks executives were doing at home and at work.
“Both spouses or partners were working at home, with everyone seeing what it’s like to have a full-time career and take care of the kids and get them from here to there," Fitzsimmons said. "I think the fallout from that may be more equality for men and women, giving people more freedom and flexibility to get their jobs done wherever they are."
