Growing up, Cecilia Frew was active in both team and individual sports, which led her to become very engaged in the ideas of teamwork, leadership and overcoming obstacles — key fundamentals to how she has approached her career.
Frew also distinctly remembers the moment where she realized she could lead others; it was playing soccer in a third grade gym class.
She recalled that she was bossing around her classmates and someone called her “sergeant.” It was at that point she realized that people don’t want to be bossed around, but rather engaged and empowered to win. She also learned that she had unique leadership skills she leveraged going forward.
“As a child I spent a lot of time doing extracurricular activities to practice my leadership skills and studied leadership in school,” said Cecilia Frew, senior vice president of Visa Direct at Visa. “As a lifelong learner, I've continued to hone this skill and read a lot about other leaders and their approaches.”
In addition to being a natural-born leader who has honed her skills over the years, Frew was also a small business owner. This helped her better connect with the needs of her customers, and how she tackles the obstacles that come her way.
There are two traits that span Frew's career as an executive and her role as a small business owner: Her work is always mission-driven, and creative problem solving is key to making systemic changes.
“This is what ultimately drew me to the world of finance and now payments, helping to create and further the adoption of solutions that promote financial inclusion,” noted Frew.
In 2020, Frew would be challenged by both the pandemic and social causes, rising to take on obstacles created to drive long-term change and bring relief to consumers and small businesses. Frew also recognized that the time was ripe to drive systemic change by promoting financial inclusion across all communities.
“Social causes have been core to what drives me, personally and professionally,” Frew said. “I'm especially passionate about financial inclusion. Throughout my career I have focused on helping underserved communities and solutioning around economic equity. With financial inclusion, this is a pervasive issue that we as an industry have an incredible opportunity to solve for. How do we help people around the world who are barely making it get out of the debt cycle and empower them to save?”
There were two main disruptions from the pandemic that Frew would need to lead her team in solving. The first was around support for small businesses whose revenues had been impacted by shelter-in-place orders and changes to consumer shopping habits, such as curbside pickup.
Frew worked with others at Visa to help small businesses adopt digital solutions that are customer-facing, such as tap-to-phone payments, as well as real-time settlement using Visa Direct. Through these services, merchants have been able to more easily pay bills, meet payroll and buy new inventory — all factors that can mean the difference between a business surviving or perishing.
The second disruption was around employees, particularly with hourly workers who rely on working in a factory or restaurant, who experienced inconsistent schedules or lessened hours.
These factors created an increase in financial stress among consumers as they figured out how to pay for bills that arrived outside of the normal two-week pay cycle. Frew worked with earned wage access providers to adopt Visa Direct, the card network’s push payment service, for providing on demand pay. This gives workers faster access to their earned wages on their own terms, such as when a bill needs to be paid.
“These faster payments tools have always been needed, but COVID-19 has accelerated their adoption and I think we'll continue to see growth in their usage post-recovery,” said Frew.
