Voice of Experience: Joanne Kinsella, Managing Director, ITRS America

by Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

When asked how she ended up in the financial technology industry, Jo Kinsella, managing director of ITRS America quickly answers: “Pure unadulterated chance.”

Indeed, her career path has wound through industries and countries, starting with French proficiency upon graduation from university from Leeds, England. And although she was able to write a thesis in the language, Kinsella did not want to be a translator. Without much office experience, she went to work as an office temp for Carlton Television but was soon promoted to full-time events manager, organizing and running corporate events, hospitality, and public relations for the shows they did around England.

Then, she caught the travel bug and spent the next two years traveling the world. “I spent nine months in Lyon and three months in Barcelona as part of my degree. I then decided I wanted to go see more of the world, so I spent 16 months touring Thailand and Australia. It was an amazing experience. I’m really glad I did it when I was just that little bit older [than the usual backpacker] because I appreciated it so much more.”

Choosing a Career Path

Still, when the time came, she said to herself, “enough of this playing around,” and got serious about finding a career path. Although she had no formal IT training at that point, she decided to pursue the system engineer certification as she’d always enjoyed “geeking around on the computer.” Kinsella completed the Microsoft system engineer certification from scratch in just three months and quickly found a job as a systems engineer with a startup telecom company, where she was put in charge of their IT security. She soon overcame her lack of professional experience in the field with “tons of on-the-job training in terms of configuring firewalls and all the rest of it.”

When the company went under just 18 months later, Kinsella, then 26 years old, went to work for Prudential-owned EGG, then the biggest internet bank in the world. They utilized her French fluency, sending her on several business trips to France and allowed her to advance rather quickly in the company.

She ultimately became the head of security operations, and was put in charge of a team of eight men who were significantly older and who had many more years of IT experience than she did. Of her role, Kinsella said, “I just threw myself in with both feet and said ‘anything is possible.’”

Any tensions were managed with grace. “I made it clear to them that I wasn’t going to know everything they know and they would be my experts collectively as a team. I told them that, in order to be successful I was going to rely on their expertise. I said, ‘Maybe I’m not going to be able to teach you anything new about security but I can teach you about business. And as soon as they realized that I was not going to just come in and bulldoze them, they were ok.”

She added, “They ended up working very well with me. I still keep in touch with some of them now.”

From there she moved to London to be the Global Program Manager for Radianz, a financial extranet provider. “For the first few months I kept looking for the crisis,” Kinsella laughed. “I’d been used to security operations where my phone was always on and it was always a heart attack waiting to happen. But when I got to Radianz, there were less fires to put out. They let me take my time to figure out my goals and set my objectives.”

Taking Advantage of Opportunities

Kinsella excelled in this role as well, spearheading a project that brought an additional two million in revenue to the company. She was promoted to Head of Market Infrastructure in the product management group, a position she maintained when the company was purchased by British Telecom. “It was a huge culture change but one that I was fine with because when there is a big company,”—the company grew from 800 to 140,000 employees—“there are usually more opportunities.”

And she took full advantage of them. “I think one of the things I’ve done throughout my career is take risks. It’s not everyday that opportunities like this present themselves at your door. You’ve got to go for it. So, I took the product management job and, after the takeover, I got a global job working across the portfolio.”

“One of the great things about BT was the flexibility. I was able to work from home and move around. It was fantastic.” The flexibility allowed her to transfer to the United States when she married an American. The couple settled in New Jersey. Kinsella remarked, “It was a big life change but there are definitely more advancement opportunities for women in New York than in London.”

When her boss left in early 2009, she—and all her male team members—applied for his job running the whole financial services portfolio for BT. She was the one chosen for the role. It was a big job, big team, big challenge, which was very exciting.”

The opportunity to assume the managing director role at ITRS presented itself soon thereafter; however, at 5 months pregnant, she wasn’t sure it was the right move. Still, says Kinsella, “I thought to myself, feel the fear and do it anyway. It is going to be a bumpy ride because there is whole lot more responsibility and I’ll be getting used to a new corporate culture and the baby at the same time.”

Kinsella loves her new company because “ITRS is like a family. It is small and very community-like; you know everybody. And, compared to BT, the ability to get stuff done is phenomenal, which is great for me because I love the whole sense of achievement, being able to stand back and say ‘we did it!’

Always Looking Ahead

She has every reason to be proud, especially when she looks at how far she has come at such a young age. “When I started off, I had no clue what I wanted to do. And in the years since, I’ve worked my way up on all the companies I’ve worked for and even managed to go traveling. I look back and say ‘not bad for 35!’

And she’s not done. Kinsella has big goals for ITRS, including taking ITRS from being Wall Street’s “best kept secret” to being ‘best of breed’ in the U.S.

But how will she manage all that and her imminent motherhood? She added, “We just moved house. I started a new job. And I’m going to have a baby. But, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that if you don’t meet ALL of your objectives for the week, that’s fine. You are not a failure. Work-life balance is hard and technology makes it hard because you are able to be contacted anywhere, day or night. You’ve just got to make sure that, especially when you go into a new role, you set some boundaries. I realize it is up to me.”

Kinsella recognizes the challenges that remain for women. “Financial services is still a man’s world. It’s easy to blame men for women being less successful; we feel it’s harder to be taken seriously. But sometimes, it’s our own fault. I think sometimes women think that in order to get on, they have to act like a man. Sometimes women hold themselves back with an ice cold, confrontational, ‘take no prisoners’ attitude. You just want to say to the women, ‘just chill. Be nice to people. You can get things done and you actually end up being more respected than when you are being a b***h. Respect has to be earned.”

She advises women to always “look forward not back. There will be bumps along the road. Just fasten your seatbelt, take a deep breath and keep moving forward.”