Why creativity is a banking-talent attribute

Here’s another installment in our periodic Q&A series highlighting women leaders in the fintech space. These interviews share valuable viewpoints on what it takes to bring a range of talent and skills to this fast-changing industry. And they explore business opportunities on the horizon for financial services and their technology partners.

Lee Farabaugh is President of Monarch Professional Services Group (Monarch), a new division of Core10 that provides implementation and customer success services for leading financial service CRM and SaaS platforms. At the division she co-founded, Farabaugh oversees operations, services delivery, community relations, business development, sales, strategic account management and marketing.

She held previous leadership roles at Core10, a U.S.-based provider of lending, account opening and middleware products, as well as software development services. Farabaugh, who has a varied background in studio art studies and advanced degrees in human-computer interaction and health informatics, serves as co-Entrepreneur in Residence for Project Fintech, an initiative of LaunchTN and Nashville Entrepreneur Center.

Your background reveals your variety of interests and experiences. How can financial services professionals and job candidates translate creative interests into problem-solving soft skills? Any advice about a pivot mid-career? And how best to leverage curiosity as an asset?

I was fortunate to have very supportive parents who encouraged me to study something I loved during my undergraduate experience: studio art. They knew that a liberal arts education is a strong foundation for any type of career. I don’t directly practice art for a living, and I never really intended to. I started my career as a web designer and front-end developer, and moved into UX/UI design and architecture after getting my master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction.

I see creative interests as being rooted in concepts of design thinking and problem solving. At the end of the day, that’s what a businessperson does: solve problems via creating thinking skills, evaluating options, and moving forward with a decision. Then we “test” that decision, identify problems that remain or now enter the picture, and start the same cycle again.

I have made several career pivots, but they always involved taking something I was doing in part and leaning into that further. For example, I took my web design and development skills with me into the pursuit of cognitive psychology to learn how to design and build systems that truly fit how humans expect to and actually process information.

I enjoyed the UX/UI field for a long time, but increasingly found myself more captivated by building teams, winning business, and scaling a startup venture, which led me into my current role running a P&L, managing sales and business operations. Even though I’ve done a lot of different jobs, there’s a thread through all of it that goes back to a love of design and computer technology.

Curiosity is always an asset. If we stop learning, we stagnate. Any employer should be proud to hire and retain a member of their team who operates with a growth mindset and is constantly looking for ways to improve herself and the business. In fact, we look for curiosity and the ability to ask great questions in our own interviews. If a candidate doesn’t have that trait, they won’t succeed in our world.

BAI would love your perspective on financial services, banking and wealth creation functioning within the startup space. There are challenges and opportunities with blending a highly regulated industry with entrepreneurial grit, experimentation and startup capital. Yet many would argue the mix is key to helping communities grow. What’s your take?

This is my favorite part of the work we’ve done at Core10 and Monarch. When we started this business, it was with a thesis that talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. We set out to see if we could build a company with team members from smaller communities throughout the U.S. These communities are tight-knit, and people want to remain in them, but the opportunity to have a solid and well-paying career isn’t necessarily present.

By establishing Core10 and later Monarch primarily in West Virginia, we took on the task of crafting deep relationships, earning trust and showing results that allowed us to raise our first $1 million of angel and venture capital in that state. From there we crafted a strong talent sourcing strategy based through the university and community college system. We worked with partners to establish a technology boot camp program. And we partnered with community financial institutions and investors to keep dollars in the area, which allowed our team members and their families to stay and thrive.

Our key measure of community success is how well our team can build generational wealth by growing their careers while remaining in the place they call home. To us, this translates to buying real property, investing in retirement and college savings accounts, starting families and establishing a legacy that benefits the generations to come.

As CRM and SaaS platforms have matured, what are some of the newer financial services market needs that your solutions aim to resolve?

Our clients and the customers they serve are mainly concentrated in investment banking, private equity, and venture capital, and we focus on the ecosystem that surrounds Intapp DealCloud, including many of their partners. These firms use their CRM for two key functions: fundraising and deal flow. They use it to communicate with LPs and potential and existing portfolio companies. It serves a significant function for efficient and timely reporting and communication within the firm and with external stakeholders.

We also work with other professional services clients, including those in real estate investing, law, accounting and corporate fundraising. The use cases are similar, but the nuances of each sub-industry are unique.

One key area we serve is ensuring that the implementation of the platform stays current with the firm’s needs and the latest features from DealCloud. This need comes from a range of firm activities, including onboarding new team members, raising additional funds, cleaning up data to ensure the system performs optimally and creating new reports.

Anyone who has used a CRM knows it is limited by how well it is initially implemented. We work with DealCloud as part of their in-house team, and we also work directly with customers. With over 1800 projects to our credit, we can confidently say that no one knows DealCloud better than we do, except maybe DealCloud! This knowledge is essential to a seamless process where no time is wasted due to incorrect or inefficient implementation, or lack of understanding of a firm’s specific use cases.

Lee Farabaugh is Cofounder and President of Monarch Professional Services Group (Monarch), a division of Core10.

Read BAI’s previous Q&A “AI’s key role in uncovering hidden value in document and data automation” with Shelby Austin, the CEO and Cofounder of Arteria AI.