Voice of Experience: Yvonne Garcia, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Client Solutions, Investment Manager Services, State Street Corporation

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The Glass Hammer is celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month by featuring profiles of Hispanic Women Business Leaders all week long!

yvonne_garciaBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Yvonne Garcia, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Client Solutions for Investment Manager Services at State Street Corporation, wishes she understood the value of professional networking and the reward associated with giving back early in her career. Although the knowledge of these important factors came along with experience, Garcia is building a strong foundation for her career on these professional tenets.

She explained, “It is at this point that it truly sinks in that you need to have access to resources, connections to decision makers, and supporters, as they will be critical throughout your professional and personal journey.”

Garcia is a true example of a professional woman who is being proactive in making sure future generations have access to the resources she identified as being so valuable to career advancement at any level. In addition to her SVP role at State Street, Garcia also serves as the National President for ALPFA, the largest Latino Professional Business Organization in the United States.

Career Path

Prior to joining State Street, Garcia served as the Director in Marketing and Distribution Strategy for Liberty Mutual’s Agency Corporation. In this role, she had the opportunity to contribute to the growth and development of new products and channels. Additionally, she was responsible for organizing a global team to ensure that all team members were delivering a consistent message true to Liberty Mutual’s brand.

Previously, Garcia also served as Vice President for Bank of America’s China Construction Bank Strategic Assistance. In this role, Garcia, along with her team, successfully created and implemented over eighty wealth management centers all throughout China. As a fully certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Garcia develops and adheres to well-planned processes and strategies and prides herself on delivering value to her clients at State Street using new approaches that are not typical within the financial industry.

In her current role at State Street, Garcia is primarily responsible for developing new client relationships, deploying cutting-edge technology and operational processes, and delivering complex consulting engagements for existing and potential State Street clients. She formulates client-focused strategies that enhance ROI for the prestigious list of the global clients she serves and creates business value for State Street.

She is particularly excited about the internal and external opportunities associated with operating a global business. Garcia said, “One area I am interested in right now is how to foster corporate cultures that encourage intelligent risk-taking behavior and how best to lead that change and get others to realize the necessity of this given the global shift in demographics (i.e. age, culture and ethnicity).”

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Voice of Experience: Deborah Hammalian, Chief Compliance Officer, ING U.S. Investment Management

debbie_hammalian_ingBy Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

According to Deborah Hammalian, Chief Compliance Officer of ING U.S. Investment Management, setting career goals can help propel you forward. “Select a few goals and map the path for each. Identifying the path is a very powerful advantage toward reaching a goal.”

But, not everyone starts their career with a clear goal in mind – Hammalian included. Even still, she says, don’t stand still. “Have a clear goal, but don’t stop if you don’t.”

Hammalian began her career as a product support specialist, and her desire to grow and learn brought her to the legal and compliance world. Then, within a few years of starting out, her industry was in turmoil and her company was facing a huge round of layoffs. Nevertheless, she stayed flexible, and found a niche that suited her well. “My ability to adapt to and manage change has been a key to my professional growth,” she said.

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Movers and Shakers: Karen Catlin, Developing powerful women leaders in the tech industry

working on a computerIn college, Karen Catlin chose to major in computer science at Brown University, despite the fact that she was not extremely familiar with computers. But as it turned out, Catlin discovered early on that she enjoyed the challenge presented to her through her computer science studies. “I enjoyed solving problems and I loved math, so it was a nice combination that allowed me to explore problem solving techniques based on mathematics,” said Catlin.

After a successful career working as a senior executive in the technology industry, Catlin is now focused on making sure women working in tech today have the resources to be successful. “I want to make sure women in tech are not opting out of the industry for the wrong reasons,” explained Catlin. “I want women to feel empowered, educated, and encouraged to have the career that they aspire to.”

Highlights in Catlin’s Career

After graduating, Catlin accepted a job at Brown researching hypertext, which was an innovative function at the time. “This was a great opportunity for me get involved with this research that was growing at the time,” explained Catlin.

Catlin moved to London with her husband, who is originally from England. Here she had the opportunity to work at a Hitachi Research Lab that was based in the UK. “It was a great experience not only working in the UK, but also working for a Japanese firm,” Catlin said. “I highly recommend that everyone gains some international experience if they can. It teaches you the skills that you need in order to be effective in different environments and different cultures.”

Although her experience working abroad allowed Catlin to gain valuable knowledge and add essential skills to her toolkit, she and her husband, who is a software developer, both felt like if they were going to work seriously in the technology industry, there was only one place for them to be. So, they packed their bags and headed back to the US with their sights set on Silicon Valley.

Catlin immediately found a job working for Go Corporation, a company that was working on tablet technology long before anyone else. She recalled being intimidated at the time even though she had a great technical background and education in technology. “If I knew the term ‘Impostor Syndrome’ at the time, I would have definitely said that I had it,” said Catlin. “I wasn’t sure I was up to getting an engineering job, so instead I got a job writing software and documentation that would teach other engineers how to write code.”

While she loved teaching other engineers, Catlin also discovered that she also enjoyed the challenge of getting things organized. She explained, “At the time Go was experiencing a lot of changes to their software specs, and they needed someone to guide the development team through this process. So I become involved in technical project management. I transitioned from being a software engineer to a manager at that point.”

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Voice of Experience: Deborah Lorenzen, COO, BK University, BNY Mellon

deb_lorenzen_smBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Deborah Lorenzen, COO, BK University, BNY Mellon, recently celebrated her 20th anniversary with BNY Mellon. This milestone is enriched by a career that has been fundamentally involved in the growth, development and enrichment of the company’s structure, business strategies and corporate culture.

Lorenzen has taken on roles in many different disciplines, locations and business units at BNY Mellon including special projects, program management, and Corporate Trust. She’s worked in San Francisco, New York, Edinburgh and London. Now in her latest role as COO of BK University, Lorenzen hopes to be part of an exciting new era of transformative change at the global financial services company. BNY Mellon provides services and solutions across the investment lifecycle.

The roots for BK University and Lorenzen’s involvement in the project were actually planted in the late nineties when she received an unexpected phone call at her desk. “One day my phone rang and it was Gerald Hassell, who had just become president of the company. He was calling because he wanted someone who could figure out how to launch a corporate University. And it took some time to get here, but I am now the COO of BK University. At the time, we weren’t ready for this on an institutional level, but now we are,” recalls Lorenzen.

On Defining a Career Path

When she looks back at her career path, Lorenzen agrees that it was not the most linear. However, she feels that her deep vault of experiences is what has shaped her and prepared her for her current role. Lorenzen said, “My interests are in how we run this company and becoming part of the leadership team that helps drive this company forward. Perhaps there could have been a more direct career path, but for me it was really important to understand a number of different disciplines and to be a more effective and well-rounded leader with the perspective to go along with the global nature of our business.” She continued, “Every single opportunity I took has helped me to understand our business more deeply.”

For Lorenzen, taking advantage of the opportunities presented to her throughout her career has contributed to her success at BNY Mellon. “I believe the greatest risk you can take in your career is to stand still,” said Lorenzen, “You have to move and you have to put yourself out of your comfort zone because that is the only way you learn. You don’t regret the things that you do. You may regret the things you don’t do.”

Impacting the culture of her company in a positive way is something that has always been a source of pride for Lorenzen. “One of the things I am most proud of is the time that I have spent connecting people,” explained Lorenzen. “I once spent six months in Edinburgh working with 400 employees of a business we had just acquired. I helped them understand how we got things done in this organization and explained the culture of our company. I enjoy making those linkages for people so that they can be more successful.”

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Intrepid Woman: Robin Morgan, Co-Founder Women’s Media Center and Host of “Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan” Radio Show

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robin_morganBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

“Despite all of the myths of women’s competitiveness, we know how to stick together,” said Robin Morgan. To Morgan, this is one of the things that make women so special. “Solidarity is not just an abstraction to women,” she continued, “it’s a practical reality, day in and day out.” It is this unique element, according to Morgan, that keeps the women’s movement going strong in the 21st century.

Morgan stated, “I am extremely proud of the fact that I have had the opportunity to be a political activist in what is the most important social and political movement on the planet, at this point in history.”

Forging Her Own Path in Activism

Morgan explained, “I had been active in the antiwar movement and in the Civil Rights movement during the sixties and seventies, and like many young women I assumed we were all fighting for equality for everyone. I thought we were going to march with our brothers, arm-in-arm, toward this great revolutionary transformation– only to find that it didn’t include women.”

She continued, “Women were expected to make coffee, not policy. It was a complete mirror image of the patriarchy we were supposed to be fighting.” This realization was a radicalizing experience for Morgan, and influenced her involvement in founding the first feminist caucus in the Civil Rights organization SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), together with now-Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton. Morgan and women in other feminist caucuses of New Left groups faced staunch opposition from men, who pelted them with tomatoes, eggs, and even rocks when they tried to speak in meetings. This backlash was a major catalyst for Morgan’s decision to distance herself from what she came to refer to as the “male left.”

Another key moment for Morgan occurred in 1968, when the Democratic National Convention was being held in Chicago, and was expected to draw (and did) a significant amount of protest activity from radical groups. Instead of joining these protests, Morgan had already decided to organize what would become a historical protest at the annual Miss America Pageant. Here, during this nationally televised event, Morgan and other members of New York Radical Women brought attention to the Women’s Movement by outwardly protesting against symbols of female oppression.

In her final public display of separation from the male left, Morgan published a piece in an underground newspaper, entitled, “Goodbye to All That,” in which she named popular male leaders of the left and called them out for their degradation of women being no different than men of the odious right. “Being a writer, first and foremost, the pen was my most powerful tool. Depending on how you look at it, this piece became very famous–or infamous,” said Morgan.

“That shut the door,” she recalled. From here, Morgan went on to publish Sisterhood Is Powerful, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed books of the 20th century. Many people credit this collection of women’s essays with starting contemporary American feminism.

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Thought Leader: Suzanne Penavić, Director of Employee Engagement, SunGard

Suzanne PenavićSuzanne Penavić, Director of Employee Engagement, SunGard encourages women to recognize the generosity of the network around them, and to actively reach out and make themselves available to it. “Networking played a big part in making my shift into diversity, inclusion, and engagement successful,” said Penavić. “That is one thing I wish I had realized earlier in my career.”

Penavić graduated from Cornell University in 1987 with a degree in Developmental Psychology. “From a career path perspective I think I followed a pretty nontraditional path,” said Penavić. This is because instead of choosing a career related to her college major, Penavić accepted a job at JP Morgan on Wall St. She said, “I caught the tail end of the Wall Street Eighties boom and I joined JP Morgan the summer before the crash.”

Career Path in Finance and Tech

Although Penavić’s time as a banker was short-lived, she was first introduced to technology, as it relates to financial services, when the entire FX back office at JP Morgan was being replaced.

“I was in charge of the Payment Investigations portion of the project,” explained Penavić, “and after that I ended up running the middle and back offices of the derivatives operations. It was the early nineties, and it was definitely the Wild West when it came to swaps and options, but it was booming. I found myself having to put these very complex synthetic instruments into an infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it.”

It was at this juncture that Penavić decided that banking wasn’t the best professional fit for her and made a swift career change when she accepted a job with a privately held software company called Microbank. Penavić recalled, “There was forty five people at the company, software was a fairly new concept at the time, and my parents thought I was crazy for leaving my job on Wall St.” She continued, “It was an opportunity I did not foresee, but it had a huge influence on my career path.”

“I essentially grew up with Microbank,” said Penavić, “As the company matured, we started a client services organization separate from development, built out proper professional services delivery capabilities, and then took it to the next level by implementing a product management and strategy function, which I was in charge of.”

Microbank was eventually acquired by Sungard, where Penavić now serves as the Director of Employee Engagement after working in several senior level product management roles in the Financial Services division. Currently, Penavić is really excited about the work she is doing to build out SunGard’s corporate social responsibility, community investment, and employee volunteerism policies and programs. “It is such a huge lever for engagement,” explained Penavić.

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Voice of Experience: Susan Lawson, Vice President, American Express Digital Technologies

susan_lawson_amexBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

For Susan Lawson, Vice President, American Express Digital Technologies, her career path in technology wasn’t exactly linear, in that she did not major in technology nor pursue a career in tech directly after school. However, when she decided that technology was the industry in which she wanted to establish her career, she returned to school to complete her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science. Susan explained, “I went into the aerospace industry to build flight simulation artificial intelligence systems.”

Susan leveraged the power of networking when she made her move to American Express. “I was based in Houston at the time, and established a great professional relationship with a person in my company working on artificial intelligence in Phoenix,” she said.

She continued, “He moved to American Express where they were building a new team to develop expert systems. He thought of me, recommended me and recruited me to work for American Express.”

Career at American Express

Susan came to American Express to work on expert systems and eventually transitioned into the Advanced Technology Group within the company. “We were focused on exploring new technologies being developed at the time that American Express could really benefit from. This was at the time that the World Wide Web was just getting started, so there were a lot of opportunities in that space,” said Susan.

Since the technology was so dynamic and critical for American Express’ business, the company created a separate group, as an extension of the Advanced Technology Group which became the Internet Development Group. Susan joined the web group and began developing secure internet capabilities globally for American Express.

“I have spent the majority of my career in the interactive and digital domain, which of course has expanded into mobile technologies and other interesting areas,” said Susan.

She is especially proud of the work she did early in her career supporting the international businesses of American Express. “Getting these markets established with secure websites for cardmembers was a breakthrough for American Express, and I love it when the work I do makes a big difference for the company. It’s exciting and very rewarding,” said Susan.

According to Susan, another highlight in her career was co-leading the complete re-architecture of American Express’ website, which supports millions of cardmembers every day. “This was a huge team, leadership, and technical endeavor that was extremely successful,” explained Susan.

Currently, in addition to research and development of new interactive and payment capabilities, Susan is spending a lot of time advancing collaborative development methodologies at American Express.

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Voice of Experience: Debra Danielson, SVP M&A Strategy and CA Distinguished Engineer, CA Technologies

deb_danielsonBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Debra Danielson, SVP M&A Strategy and CA Distinguished Engineer, CA Technologies is committed to making sure that future generations of women in technology have access to the opportunities that will help them advance their career.

This is why she is actively involved in a number of programs at CA Technologies to promote the advancement of women. Danielson said, “I was tasked, along with three other women, to develop a Women in Technology organization within CA to create a forum for networking within the community. This group also provides a foundation for mentoring.” She continued, “It started out as a grass roots organization that has become formalized over the last year.”

Career Path

Danielson started her career in technology as a software developer for Applied Data Research. “The first fifteen years of my career were pretty straightforward,” said Danielson, “I had increasing responsibilities in engineering and then entered management for ADR and Computer Associates, which acquired ADR around 1988.”

During that fifteen year period of her career, Danielson spent a lot of time focusing in integrated development environments creating technologies that would improve the developer experience. “We did a lot of interesting work in introducing multimedia into the developer experience, which was new and exciting technology at the time in the mid-eighties,” recalled Danielson.

After fifteen years of concentrating on the developer experience, Danielson switched gears when she began to think more about the quality of the end user experience. “We needed to rethink our end user experience,” explained Danielson, “So I ended up bringing user centric design and usability into the organization. It was critical to implement a sense of continuity across all of our products since our end users were becoming more generalized and less specialized.”

This focus on improving the end user experience associated with CA’s products led Danielson into a series of roles overseeing the coming together of technology designed to create a broader solution applicable across all of the unique products offered by CA. “For a couple of years, I helped transform CA from a company that delivered point products to a company that delivers integrated solutions that are consistent with one another,” explained Danielson.

CA’s executive management team then introduced the idea of building an organization within the company that would create a stronger and more dynamic technical community, according to Danielson. “I was appointed as one of the charter members of this think tank whose purpose was to push the boundaries within CA and leveraging the scope of the technical talent we had within the organization,” said Danielson.

She continued, “After a couple of months, we formally structured the think tank and I was elected the first president of the Council for Technical Excellence, which was responsible for developing a creative and innovative technical community, and bring our innovation and organic exploration to a next level.”

According to Danielson, the Council for Technical Excellence set the tone for the strategic transformation that has taken place at CA Technologies over the last five to eight years. She added, “One of the key roles I have been able to play within the organization is to take a look at the forces within the ecosystem, identify factors placing stress on that system, and develop a strategy for where the organization needs to be going.”

For the last couple of years, Danielson has been working on mergers and acquisitions and corporate strategy at CA, mostly focusing on bringing inorganic innovation into CA. “I look at technology from startup organizations and other companies and make an assessment about the value of that technology. This is hugely rewarding because it allows us to accelerate the impact that we have on the business.”

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Voice of Experience: Jane Moran, Global CIO, Thomson Reuters

jane_moranBy Michelle Hendelman, Editor-in-Chief

Jane Moran, Global CIO, Thomson Reuters has been working in Information Technology in the finance sector for the last 25 years, but it is not where she started out. “After college I became a business analyst for a venture capital firm where I learned that my skill set was better suited to networking our office. I became known as the go-to person who could fix any PC or server,” recalled Moran.

The president of the company, who Moran had the opportunity to work with directly, recognized her ability and sponsored her to take computer science classes. This set the foundation for Moran’s career in tech as she went on to earn her MBA with a focus on IT from Boston University. Moran then went on to work for a consulting firm, where she spent five years developing portfolio management and trading platforms for financial institutions.

“I consulted for about eleven years, but when I was pregnant with my second child, I couldn’t continue to travel for work as much. I ended on a consulting assignment for a small dotcom firm in Boston and they actually offered me a CIO position, which I accepted since it was based in Boston,” explained Moran.

The company was eventually acquired by Thomson Financial in 2004. “In 2005, I became the Global CIO of Thomson Financial, which was a two billion dollar company at the time,” said Moran.

In 2008, Moran’s career advancement continued when she became the Global CIO of the Markets division for the Thomson Corporation, which had recently acquired Reuters. Moran said, “In 2010 the company centralized all of IT, and that is when I became the Global CIO for Thomson Reuters.”

Moran added that she graduated from Brown University with a degree in History and full intentions of entering the legal field. “You don’t need a technical degree to be technical,” explained Moran. “You just need to enjoy what you do. That’s the most important thing.”

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Voice of Experience: Mary Byron, Global Head of Technology for the Federation, Goldman Sachs

Mary ByronRegarding her career path in technology, Mary Byron notes that it was more of a serendipitous accident as opposed to a calculated plan.

“I didn’t study technology in school, but I was very lucky to have a job in college doing general office work,” said Byron. “One of the tasks was backing up the Word Processing system. They needed someone who could manage pretty basic technology functions and I was fortunate enough to be exposed to this kind of work right around the time personal computing and networking was starting to be widely developed.”

She continued, “As it turns out, I loved technology and I was skilled at it. So I never looked back after starting down that path.”

Career Path in Technology

Throughout her career with Goldman Sachs, Byron has had the opportunity to lead the implementation of many new technologies for the company, including building out the IP network for the firm in the nineties. “I was fortunate that as the Internet really took off, so did all the technologies that supported it and the need for companies to adopt those technologies,” explained Byron.

Byron recalled, “We didn’t even have email when I started at the firm, and every division ran its own technology. In 1994, the company decided to streamline all of the individual IT departments into one centralized division. For seven years we worked on converging eleven different email systems into one uniform system.”

In the early 2000s Byron became the Co-head of Goldman’s technology infrastructure, which included all data centers, networks, computing platforms, operating systems, databases, and help desks.

In 2005, Byron was chosen to be the CIO for Goldman’s Asia business, where she spent six years. “It was exciting to be part of this growth market,” said Byron, “as we were establishing our business in China and India, which are both countries with very different levels of technical prowess and technology adoption.”

During this time, Byron worked on establishing good governance and best practices for the technology division. Organizing this aspect of the business and showing people how to think about technological investments in commercial terms is something that Byron is extremely proud of. She said, “Moving these ideas forward so that they became institutionally recognized as the way we address technology has been very rewarding.”

Byron stated, “I think of all technology as an evolution. In the past, one of the projects I worked on was our first implementation of grid computing, which was the precursor to the cloud. Now, we are working a lot on dynamic computing and the automation of infrastructure, which are things that we identified a need for ten years ago and now have the technology to implement.”

The grid computing project, which Byron referred to as the compute farm, is one project that stands out to her as being one of her most exciting professional achievements. She explained, “When we first started, we anticipated one or two thousand computing engines running on the grid. Now we have tens of thousands computers running on it.”

This dynamic nature of technology and applying technology to solve problems are two things that make Byron excited about the work she currently does in her role as Global Head of Technology for the Federation. “We are spending a lot of time right now working on big data and data governance,” said Byron.

She continued, “Sometimes our best technological ideas are not really about the technology at all, but how we can leverage the technology to make our business bigger and better.”

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