Fintech Feminists

CHAPTER EIGHTTHE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENS

Born in Ethiopia, Lule Demmissie traveled and lived in numerous countries before finding her anchor in the United States at 16. Her sharp intelligence and drive led her to Smith College, where she graduated with a degree in economics in 1996. By the early 2000s, she was in Columbia Business School when the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 dropped by 80% due to the boom and subsequent bust of new-age start-ups.¹ The US economy, also reeling from the fallout of the 11 September attacks, plunged into an eight-month recession. She eventually graduated in 2001 and soon after began her career on Wall Street, working in equity research, saddled with student loan debt and supported by a work visa. She was an analyst and financial consultant at JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch, prior to business school. After her MBA from Columbia, she took up executive director roles at Morgan Stanley and TD Ameritrade and eventually climbed the ranks to become the President of Ally Invest in 2019. During those two decades, she absorbed the lessons of Wall Street like a sponge, realizing that behind the scenes, money, economics, and capital markets lie a source of individual empowerment, particularly for those unrepresented communities overlooked. She survived the last three market meltdowns – the dot-com bubble, the Global Financial Crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic – as a person, an investor, and an industry leader. Her mental framework of “this too shall pass” enabled her ...