My Story: Monica Sasso

By Monica Sasso

My career journey, like so many others’, has been filled with many wiggles, turns, bumps and has most definitely not been linear (despite my best efforts sometimes!). There has been three big turning points or wiggles in my life that have brought me here and shaped me as a leader.

The first one was being at orientation for my master’s degree I found out the programme I wanted to do was not available for master’s students – I wanted to get my MSc in Industrial and Systems engineering and specialise in Financial Engineering. Instead, I specialised in management of technology and got out in nine months. I then decided that at some point I’d get into financial services – by hook or by crook.

The second was when I was travelling after I finished my master’s degree, I met this wonderful Dutch woman called Ilze, in Guatemala. Turned out her firm in the Netherlands was looking for systems engineers who had specialised in safety engineering. This was what I had specialised in during my undergraduate studies in Industrial engineering. So I ended up moving to the Netherlands right after my university studies to become an engineering consultant. After 10 years of being an engineering consultant, I finally was able to realise my goal of being in financial services (FS)! My first role in an FS firm was helping build a data centre for a firm in the UK, and that was it. I was where I wanted to be. I carried on being a delivery lead, moving onto becoming programme director, head of transformation, head of global regulatory & risk change and then finally into a fascinating role where I established a digital business development function. The last role was so interesting to me, because it allowed me to take all the knowledge, I had obtained by delivering large, global regulatory and digital transformation initiatives and use them to drive commercial transformation.

The third turning point for me that brought me firmly into big tech was about six years ago. I was working at a large universal bank, as the global head of regulatory and risk change, and I had just finished a massive programme, where I was increasingly frustrated by the giant wall between IT and the business. So I asked leadership if I could do some time in IT to understand how tech worked, because I thought as tech became more ubiquitous, how we changed the client journey and implemented new regulations would be more complex and in turn disrupt the client journey even more – I expressed a view that if we were more joined up and more strategic, we could save money and disrupt the business and our clients less. I was told, “it will take you off the MD path”, so I voted with my feet and moved into big tech. And I have never looked back!

All of my wiggles have taught me that it is never about the tech or the money; driving any change, or growing a business or delighting a client is all about the people. People use tech, tech is a tool. People design and deliver the processes that are digitised, or automated or delivered through AI. People consume the stuff that these processes deliver. So actually, removing people from the transformation or not focusing on them or making up teams that do not reflect the end consumers almost guarantees the wrong outcome –> rather, the opposite of success! I have learned about open source software and the open source community from my time at Red Hat and really think that community, people and soft skills are what we need to double down on as leaders in a digital first world. Adding to that, proprietary technologies are just bad for society; and now all of these themes are coming together and have reinforced to me that as we move into the AI Era soft skills are the new hard skills. That is what will differentiate AI slop from meaningful digital transformation. And with that differentiation will come better engaged employees and a better outcome for the end client, driving a positive impact on the bottom line.