Through interviews with successful fintech leaders, fintech leader and author Leda Glyptis discovered that lasting financial innovation requires deliberate resource allocation, effective team building, and embracing control over variables rather than unbridled creativity.
Success is often portrayed as a glamorous journey of resilience and grit, especially in fintech banking innovation, but the reality is far more complex and less forgiving.
On a recent episode of the Banking Transformed podcast, host Jim Marous spoke with renowned fintech leader and author Leda Glyptis about her new book, “Beyond Resilience: Patterns of Success in Fintech and Digital Transformation,” which reveals that survival in this industry is not about luck or brilliance, but about mastering the art of doing hard, often unglamorous work consistently — and with precision.
Q: What inspired you to write “Beyond Resilience,” and what gap did you see in the narrative?
Leda Glyptis: While I was writing my first book, which was a distillation of the work I’ve done and a reflection on all the things that we keep doing badly when we’re trying to transform our businesses, I actually started thinking, “Hold on a second, we fail a lot.” Failure rates are super high in digital transformation in finance. We all know that about 95% of startups and financial services fail, and about 70% of digital transformations fail.
And although they’re staggeringly high, the success rate is not zero. So I called my publisher, and I said, “I’ve got a different question. I want to explore this because it’s positive, it’s constructive and I don’t know the answer.”
We beat the industry up a lot, most of the time for good reasons. But actually, we don’t just do that, there’s quite a lot of spectacularly interesting work, and I wanted to see if the successes had any repeatability in them or whether they were heroic efforts against the odds that couldn’t be repeated.
Q: What does going beyond resilience really mean in financial services?
Glyptis: When I started doing this research, I was looking at what these endeavours have in common beyond the need for resilience. The book spends a lot of pages on things like governance, and operational dynamics that need to be right, really early on. You need to think about things that may look boring for a startup founder, but actually, your operating cost, your cost to serve, your target addressable market, and price point flexes have to be put in place early on.
I started by asking, “Do we have unique resilience in all these people?” Then I went through a very long list of things that need to be true for success and came full circle saying, “Resilience is not enough, but actually if you don’t have personal resilience, this work is not for you.” And that has to be okay. This work is not for everyone and that has to be okay. It’s a jungle. It’s extremely hard work, and the vast majority of days are mired in difficulty, and the vast majority of endeavours fail.
Control vs. Creativity in Innovation
Q: Why is control often more important than creativity when building new financial services?
Glyptis: There are three layers in which control is important. The first one is that we have received images in our industry about what digital transformation and successful startups are like, including that notorious phrase of “move fast and break things.” And the reality is, in financial services, that’s not great advice. Moving fast is great, breaking things is not great when you’re dealing with regulated businesses and people’s money.
The second element of control is that you have to control your variables. There are a set of questions that are part of your hypothesis. Go out there and find out what the answer is and then come back and show me that you’ve adjusted accordingly.
One of my favourite cases is Kelvin Tan’s Audax, which is a startup owned by Standard Chartered. One of the things he said is that he went out and tested his price point really early with a market and was prepared to flex his operating cost accordingly. That is control — going out there, testing your hypothesis, finding out whether you’re right or not, and adjusting accordingly.
Q: How can leaders balance controlling variables while still encouraging innovation?
Glyptis: The third layer in which control is important is that there are always things that are inside your control and things that aren’t. How the market will behave is not in your control, the assumptions you make about things you genuinely don’t know — you’re going to make mistakes. That’s all outside your control.
However, having feedback mechanisms, acting on that feedback, and having scenario planning so you can test your hypothesis are all under your control. How you spend time and money is in your control, how you manage your team, and who you bring in when.
The idea of “we’re going to throw things to the wall and see how they go” couldn’t be further from the truth of how people build businesses. There is a very large element of trying to define as many variables in order to control them because that’s how you get over the finish line with enough gas in the tank. So creativity is key but in specific areas of your business. 99% of what you need to do to get to the finish line is about taking the feedback, acting on it, and controlling all the variables that you can.
Learning from Setbacks
Q: How should leaders think about success and failure differently?
Glyptis: When I said to people, “I want to talk about patterns of success,” they recoiled. Some of the people I spoke to have personal success, and organizational success, some have done it more than once, and yet the word success made them uncomfortable. But I think part of the reason success made them uncomfortable is that we have often thought about success and failure as final states of being, and neither is a final state of being.
Nobody was satisfied even after they had succeeded. They felt that they had learned enough to do it better. And every single one of the people I interviewed was doing something for the second, third, or fourth time because even if they had success the previous time, they learned something.
The vast majority of human endeavours are neither unqualified successes nor unqualified failures, and there’s always a learning opportunity. Are you taking the learning? People always do better in their second rodeo. They know what pitfalls to avoid. You know where the treasure is hidden and where the pitfalls are. That doesn’t mean you know all the answers, but you can get to some outcomes faster.
Q: What are the biggest challenges that stand in the way of successful transformation?
Glyptis: There are two buckets of problems that you are almost guaranteed to come across. The first one I’m going to call running out of runway, but that runway may not necessarily be money.
In a big organization, you might find that you started a five-year transformation, and you’re two years in. It’s going great, but other things have come up: people are losing interest, and some of the leadership is moving around. And all of a sudden, even though it’s going great, it’s not — you’ve lost the single most important currency in a big organization, which is leadership headspace.
The second thing that is a huge roadblock to success is that the vast majority of people who are drawn to this work want to have an impact. When there is such a big driver of having an impact, taking feedback can become very personal. Is someone giving me this feedback because they want me to succeed and I’ve got a blind spot, or because they’re a naysayer and I should just push on?
Having the ability to pivot, listen to feedback, take it on board, and not lose that vision of where you’re going and what impact you’re trying to have is extremely hard. The chances of the idea being exactly how you’re going to build it as it is formulated in your head is zero. So how do you navigate still going to where you’re going, taking the feedback without being derailed?
Q: What advice would you give to banking executives embarking on new initiatives?
Glyptis: There are two pieces of advice no matter what type of transformational business you’re in. The first one is to be brutally honest with yourself and your team about what currency you’re managing against. We talked about examples — it’s enthusiasm, it’s support, it’s political backing, it’s headspace, and it’s money.
Have that honesty early on and have it with your team so that you’re managing to have the same hourglass and that the sand that you’re seeing run down means the same thing to everyone. Money will invariably be a factor, but it might not be the dollars, it might be the cycles for the next investment committee or the next review. Be honest and don’t dismiss it.
I have seen so many founders and leaders say the organization or the investor has backed what we’re doing, but these things are just markings in the calendar. No, they’re not. Be absolutely honest about what currency you’re managing and manage it. Manage your proof points, manage every flex you have to increase how much of that currency you have — you’re going to need it.
The second thing is what we’ve said time and time again — it is hard work. There is no working around that, and leaders need a lot of personal resilience. Being able to bounce back and keep going is not a choice, but doing it alone is. So find your tribe, find your people, and find the people with whom you have that trust relationship. You know that they’ll call out your blind spots and take them with you on the journey.
They’re not going to make it easier, but they will make it feel easier because you will not be alone where it matters. It’s not just about having bodies there; it’s about what they do for you, how they protect you, accelerate you, and make you better by calling out your blind spots.
Recent Comments