Greetings, Everyone! I’m excited to share my recent interview with Michelle Tran and Sasha Pilch, co-founders of NYC Fintech Women shortly after their epic IWD Women in Leadership event with Nasdaq and UN Women.

1. 1. When and where was NYC Fintech Women founded? NYC FinTech Women was founded in September 2017 in New York City. Our very first meetup was at a bar on 20th and Park in the Flatiron District aka Silicon Alley. 16 women came to the meetup on a rainy Tuesday, one of them being Sasha Pilch, Co-Founder.
   2. What are your guiding principles? Our mission is to connect, promote and empower women in their professional advancement in FinTech. Our goals are to provide the events, platforms, and programs to support our mission.
   3. Who is leading NYC FW, and how many team members do you have? Michelle Tran and Sasha Pilch are the Co-Founders of NYC FinTech Women, but we have an amazing team driving all that NYC FW does. We have a leadership team who meets regularly to discuss strategy and what we can do for our members. Then we have 15+ women who volunteer for our organization in a range of functions: marketing, events, operations, tech, talent and more. All team members work with NYC FinTech Women as volunteers because they are passionate about our mission. We are so grateful for all of our volunteers and their commitment to our mission!
   4. What are some milestones in your evolution? We have so many amazing milestones! We launched FinTech Female Fridays in March 2019 and have featured over 24 outstanding women to date. We hosted over 200 women at our first International Women’s Day event at Shearman and Sterling, our first major celebration of IWD. We rang the opening bell at IEX to celebrate the Inspiring FinTech Females of 2019, the first annual recognition list. We were excited to partner with Nasdaq and UN Women to host this year’s IWD on March 8th and to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange and closing bell with Nasdaq!
   5. What benefits, services and opportunities do you offer to members? Our members have access to industry-leading events, programming like FinTech Female Fridays, FinTech Fireside Minute and our brand new Talk of Her Town podcast. We also work with early and late-stage FinTechs to showcase jobs they are hiring for as part of our #HireHer campaign. We are working hard on more networking events and community-oriented access. Our members used to come to our in-person events for both the thought leadership and the networking. We’ve lost some of the community building and networking when went remote because of COVID. Stay tuned! We will start offering more ways for our members to stay connected to each other.
   6. What’s next for NYC FW and how can people join and become involved? We are expanding! While our name says NYC, our members are really everywhere, especially with remote-first becoming the norm. 60 percent of our members are in New York and 40 percent are all over the US and even internationally. Look out for news about expanding to cities like San Francisco and Atlanta.

Sign up to be a member at NYC FinTech Women. There is no cost to join and we did that purposely. We want everyone to have access. Members get early access to events and community building and networking.

Thank you, Michelle and Sasha. I look forward to covering more events at NYC Fintech Women and so glad I joined!

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Author

Dale S. Laszig, senior staff writer at The Green Sheet and managing director at DSL Direct LLC, is a payments industry journalist and content strategist. Connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalelaszig/ and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DSLdirect