Are We Hiring for Potential or Just Repeating the Past?
What happens when businesses stop treating inclusion as an HR initiative and start recognising it as a commercial advantage?
In this episode of FinTech's DEI Discussions, Nadia is joined by Christina Di Nolfo, CEO of Collection Pot, for a conversation spanning leadership, workplace culture, diversity and inclusion, hiring for potential, psychological safety, female leadership, access to opportunity and the growing influence of artificial intelligence on the decisions businesses make.
Christina brings more than 30 years of experience across technology, financial services and global business to the discussion. Her career has included building businesses, scaling organisations across dozens of countries, working with start-ups and global enterprises, sitting around board tables and helping organisations navigate transformation. One of her earliest businesses grew from nothing to around 54 million in revenue in just four years, and she later worked within organisations including IBM, Thomson Reuters and HP, as well as several FinTech businesses, before becoming CEO of Collection Pot.
Yet the thread Christina sees running through those experiences is not simply technology. It is people. That distinction becomes central to an episode that asks important questions for leaders across financial technology and financial services: how do you build teams capable of challenging established thinking? How do you recognise talent that does not follow a conventional career path? And as businesses increasingly embrace AI, how do they make sure technology does not simply reinforce decisions and inequalities inherited from the past?
FinTech Leadership Is About More Than Having the Right Strategy
One of Christina's biggest lessons from her career is that strategy is rarely the factor that ultimately holds a business back. Execution is often the bigger challenge, and execution comes down to culture, leadership and whether people feel sufficiently trusted to bring their best ideas into the workplace. It also depends on whether an organisation has the right mix of people around the table.
For leaders working across FinTech, financial services and technology, this creates an important connection between business performance and people strategy. Organisations can have ambitious plans for transformation, innovation and growth, but their ability to deliver them depends heavily on the environment in which their people are operating.
Christina's career also challenges the assumption that entrepreneurial work can only happen within smaller businesses. Reflecting on her time within major global organisations, she explains that many of her roles were highly entrepreneurial, involving the creation of new businesses from scratch within much larger corporate structures.
That experience has helped shape her leadership philosophy today and her belief that technology may continue to change, but human behaviour remains fundamental to how organisations succeed.
Building Human Connection Through Financial Technology
The conversation moves into Christina's work at Collection Pot and the mission behind the business. On the surface, Collection Pot is a group collection platform used for occasions including birthdays, weddings, new babies, retirements, teacher gifts and workplace milestones. Christina, however, describes its purpose in much more human terms.
Rather than simply selling the functionality of a group collection platform, she sees the business as helping to create moments where people feel appreciated. A message from a colleague can change somebody's week, while a collection can remind an individual that they matter. Collection Pot's mission is therefore centred around making people smile and bringing more joy and celebration into the world.
It demonstrates a wider lesson for the financial technology industry. Technology does not have to remove humanity from an interaction. Christina believes it should amplify it.
That philosophy influences Collection Pot's product design, customer service and internal culture. Everything comes back to whether something genuinely makes an individual's life easier while strengthening human connection.
Nadia highlights an important distinction here. Particularly in FinTech, founders and businesses can become focused on explaining what a product does. Christina's approach instead considers how the product makes somebody feel. For a technology business, understanding that human outcome can be just as important as understanding the underlying functionality.
Why Diversity in FinTech Is a Commercial Advantage
Diversity and inclusion are frequently discussed through the lens of moral responsibility, but Christina challenges businesses to broaden the way they think about the subject.
From her perspective, diversity is a commercial advantage.
If everybody around a board table thinks in the same way, comes from a similar background and has followed a similar career path, the group might be capable of reaching decisions faster. That does not necessarily mean they will reach the best decision.
Christina argues that innovation can emerge from what she describes as "constructive tension": different perspectives, experiences and approaches to solving the same problem. Having worked across countries around the world and led multicultural teams, she has seen some of the best ideas come from people who were not initially the loudest voices in the room.
For leaders, the objective should therefore not be to personally have every answer. Leadership should involve creating an environment where the strongest ideas can surface regardless of where they originate.
This has direct relevance to FinTech recruitment and financial technology recruitment. Hiring a workforce made up of people who have taken identical routes through the industry may feel like a safe recruitment strategy, but it can also limit the perspectives available to a business. In a sector built around solving complex problems and challenging established financial models, creating teams capable of bringing genuinely different thinking to the table can strengthen decision-making and innovation.
At Collection Pot, Christina has also taken practical action around representation. When she joined the business in February of the previous year, there was only one other woman. Since then, the company has reached a 50/50 split, something Christina notes is significant for a FinTech business.
Psychological Safety Can Transform FinTech Workplace Culture
Representation alone does not guarantee that different perspectives will influence a business. People also need an environment where they feel able to use their voice.
For Christina, one of the first priorities at Collection Pot was therefore creating psychological safety.
She contrasts this with organisations where leadership operates through fear. While fear may produce results, Christina questions what businesses potentially miss as a consequence.
Psychological safety does not mean everybody agrees. Nor does it mean difficult conversations disappear. Instead, Christina explains that people need to know they can challenge, disagree, deliver bad news, ask questions and own their mistakes. The organisation can then work collectively to overcome those challenges and find solutions more quickly.
This is particularly important in innovative and fast-moving sectors. Great ideas do not automatically belong to the most senior person in the organisation.
At Collection Pot, some product improvements have come from customer support, while operational improvements have originated in finance. Strategic conversations have also included people who traditionally might not have been given a seat at the table.
When employees understand what they are doing rather than simply being told what to do, Christina believes engagement, ownership and performance all change.
Culture, therefore, cannot simply be communicated through corporate values printed on a wall. It is created through the interactions happening throughout an organisation every week. Christina recalls her own experience in big technology companies, where she was often the only woman in the room despite organisations outwardly communicating messages around culture, inclusion and diversity.
FinTech Recruitment Needs to Recognise Potential, Not Just Experience
One of the most powerful parts of the episode centres on identifying potential, particularly potential in somebody who does not look or sound like the people a hiring manager has traditionally recruited.
Christina describes this as one of the biggest blind spots in business.
She highlights an observation that she believes continues to resonate: men are often hired according to what they could become, while women are more frequently hired according to what they have already proven they can do. She also discusses the tendency for women to apply when they meet almost every requirement of a role, compared with men applying when they meet only some.
Her conclusion is particularly relevant to the recruitment industry: potential isn't gendered, but opportunity often is.
Rather than asking whether a woman has previously performed an identical job, Christina believes employers should be asking whether she has the capability to grow into it.
For businesses thinking about their FinTech hiring strategy, this is a significant challenge to traditional recruitment thinking. Hiring purely against previous job titles or identical experience can overlook transferable skills, problem-solving ability and the potential an individual could bring to a new environment.
Christina experienced this herself. At points during her career, she stopped focusing conversations on job titles and instead talked about her skill sets, how she solved problems and the value she could bring to an organisation. She explains that there were occasions where she did not receive the corresponding job titles despite already carrying out those jobs, or even roles with greater responsibility.
For financial services recruitment and FinTech recruitment, this raises a fundamental question: are organisations recruiting for what their businesses need next, or simply searching for somebody who looks exactly like the person who succeeded before?
Breaking Glass Ceilings Means Addressing Access and Opportunity
The episode also explores the continued existence of glass ceilings.
Christina believes today's barriers are often about access rather than solely explicit discrimination. That includes access to networks, investors, sponsors and opportunities.
She points to the limited funding reaching female-only founding teams and argues that addressing this should not simply be viewed as an equality issue. There is also an economic argument for improving the opportunities available to female founders and leaders.
Christina discusses her work as a strategic adviser to The Master Collective, a platform designed to match investors and investments. Part of its work will involve a female-focused offering intended to increase investment flowing towards female founders and leaders and help address the funding gap.
While Christina has seen more women entering organisations at middle-tier levels, she says they remain significantly underrepresented at the top.
The challenge for financial technology employers is therefore not simply attracting a diverse range of people into their organisations. Businesses also need to consider who receives the opportunities, sponsorship and access required to progress into leadership.
AI in Hiring Cannot Simply Repeat Historical Decisions
As businesses across financial services increasingly adopt artificial intelligence, Nadia and Christina also explore the risks of relying too heavily on historical information to determine future outcomes.
Christina's call to action begins with a straightforward challenge: stop hiring based solely on the past.
She refers to the example of Amazon's previous experience using AI in hiring, where historical data created problems because women had historically not occupied many of the senior positions represented in that data. Her wider point is that data can be valuable in decision-making, but if an organisation wants a different future outcome, relying exclusively on historical patterns may not achieve it.
This creates an increasingly important conversation around AI in FinTech recruitment, talent acquisition and the future of hiring across financial services.
AI can transform how businesses operate, but historical information needs to be questioned rather than treated as automatically neutral. As Nadia reflects during the conversation, feeding old data into an AI tool risks repeating mistakes from the past if nobody is there to challenge the conclusions it produces.
For FinTech employers investing in AI-enabled recruitment and talent technology, the lesson is not that data should be ignored. It is that human judgement, questioning and context remain essential.
Inclusive Leadership Must Become an Everyday Behaviour
For Christina, responsibility for inclusion cannot simply be handed to HR.
It needs to become a leadership behaviour.
That can begin with seemingly small decisions: who is invited to meetings, who receives stretch opportunities, whose ideas are heard and who receives sponsorship. A single conversation, she explains, can change somebody's career.
At Collection Pot, Christina wants to understand where people within the organisation want their careers to go. She describes the business as a learning organisation, where employees can be open about their aspirations and leaders can explore how those ambitions might be supported.
Those conversations can also reveal skills that might otherwise remain hidden, creating new opportunities for individuals while helping the business better understand the talent it already has.
For organisations competing for specialist talent across financial technology, this matters beyond initial recruitment. FinTech talent retention, development and internal mobility all depend on employees believing that their ambitions are being heard and that opportunities to progress are genuinely available.
The Future of FinTech Needs Technology and Empathy
As the conversation draws towards its conclusion, Christina brings together two themes that run throughout the episode: technology and humanity.
She believes the future belongs to organisations capable of truly combining technology and empathy.
AI will radically change aspects of how businesses operate, but Christina argues that human intervention will remain necessary. Technology still needs people to analyse information and bring human sentiment into decision-making.
This idea reflects Christina's earlier description of Collection Pot itself. Technology should not automatically replace humanity; at its best, it can amplify it.
The same principle can be applied to recruitment, leadership and workplace culture. AI and data can support decisions, but businesses still need people willing to question what the data represents, whose experiences might be absent and whether the outcome they are creating is genuinely the outcome they want.
Christina closes with further evidence of how bias can shape opportunity before a final decision is even made. She discusses research showing that investors frequently ask men promotion-focused questions and women prevention-focused questions, changing the nature of the conversation before an investment decision has been reached. She also references the Rose Review and its estimate that unlocking female entrepreneurship could add around £250 billion to the UK economy.
For Christina, this reinforces why the conversation should extend beyond diversity or gender alone. There are wider economic, cultural and wellbeing benefits associated with genuinely mixed workforces and leadership teams.
What Does This Mean for the Future of FinTech Recruitment?
This episode of FinTech's DEI Discussions ultimately challenges businesses to think differently about where great people, ideas and future leaders come from.
For employers across financial technology and financial services, hiring the strongest talent cannot always mean searching for somebody who has already held an identical title at an identical organisation. Building high-performing teams also requires businesses to recognise capability, transferable skills and future potential.
Diversity can create the constructive tension that challenges groupthink. Psychological safety can give employees the confidence to turn different perspectives into meaningful ideas. Inclusive leadership can determine who gets access to opportunities. And thoughtful use of technology can help businesses move forward without automatically recreating patterns inherited from the past.
For FinTech recruitment, these issues are becoming increasingly important as financial technology organisations compete for specialist skills while simultaneously adapting to AI, changing workforce expectations and new approaches to leadership.
Christina's experience offers a clear reminder that technology alone does not determine whether transformation succeeds. People do.
Businesses can have the right technology and an ambitious strategy, but execution depends on culture, leadership, trust and whether the people within an organisation believe their ideas will be heard.
