Fintech Feminists

CHAPTER FOURFINANCIAL HEALTH IS HEALTH

Dani Fava became a single mom at 19 while still in college. She landed a job immediately after graduating, offering trade support at an investment manager on Wall Street. Every morning, she had to drop her daughter off at daycare, take the express bus into Manhattan, and be at work by 8:30 a.m. to run trading reports for all the traders. “At the time, I printed the reports, stapled them together, and put them on everyone’s desk before the market opened at 9 a.m.,” she shared. “So you can imagine my mornings being very stressful.”

Realizing there had to be a better way to manage these tasks, she thought, “Can I automate this?” Using a somewhat open technology platform that allowed for custom commands, Fava figured out how to schedule and run the reports, then send them directly to the printer – all through her own coding. “I called it a hack because I essentially hacked into the platform to write my own code and automate these tasks,” she said. This innovation saved her an extra 20 minutes each morning, which, as any mom would know, was invaluable.

One day, she received a phone call from the technology company behind the platform she was coding into. Fearing the worst, she thought she was getting fired. Instead, the company, impressed with her idea and ability to write code, offered her a job. She accepted, and that’s how her journey into fintech began. “Since then, I’ve been innovating and solving problems,” she shared.

NECESSITY IS ...