Serena and creative leadership
“I tell young people, don’t be obsessed with making the right choice. Not knowing what to do when you grow up was normal for me. You have to experiment.” Serena Maria Torielli is the co-founder and managing director of Wealthype, an Italian fintech working in data analytics, AI and digital marketing for banks and insurance companies, recently acquired by Azimut.
Before becoming an entrepreneur and a woman at the top, she followed a traditional path in finance. “I decided to study Economics because it opened a lot of doors, and that’s when I realized I didn’t want to be a researcher, I wanted to work in consulting. I sent out my résumé, and the few companies that replied told me: ‘No thanks, we’re not recruiting.’ So I ended up where I least expected: at JP Morgan as a trader, before the euro.” I was one of the few female traders, I always felt a bit like a panda, but the environment was young, international and my colleagues were all very smart people,” she adds. The company saw promise in Torielli and later invested in training, sending her to New York for nine months for a specialized course. In the eight years she stayed with the bank, she became Vice President of Fixed Income Sales. She was then approached by Goldman Sachs to work in trading. Here, too, she rose through the ranks: from 2000 to 2007, she was managing director of Fixed Income Clearing Corporations (FICC).
“After that,” she explains, “I wanted to gain more entrepreneurial experience, so I spent three years at Banca Leonardo, building a project that unfortunately never launched, with the 2008–2009 crisis. At that point I decided I was fed up with finance.” So she went into business for herself. Together with a few former colleagues, she decided to set up a company dealing with new technologies for finance, in order to make it more democratic. “I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, you’re born with it, in a way. But it wasn’t easy. There were few venture capitalists, and there were institutions that lacked vision and were looking for a carbon copy of the Silicon Valley start-up model. All that made our path longer, no doubt,”
she adds.
After 10 years, last year saw the arrival of a major industrial partner – Azimut – and the opportunity to grow and “scale up,” as they say in start-up jargon. Torielli was on the right track, and won the accolades to prove it: in 2018 she was one of the “Inspiring Fifty,” the 50 most influential women in the Italian tech sector.
Today she sits on two boards: We Build and Tiscali, where she is an independent director. She says: “These are not the old-style boards of the past, with only lawyers or economists. I was chosen not so much because I was a woman, but because I had a different managerial and entrepreneurial background, so I can bring in innovative ideas.” Yet she does acknowledge the gender gap: “I’ve always seen diversity in the eyes of people who look at me, but for me being different is an asset. Maybe as a man I would have found the resources I needed for the company more quickly, who knows. We’ll never know. What I do know is that technology has no gender, and there is room for young women.”
As for leadership, she insists: “I’m always forward looking, and try to bring a bit of creativity and lateral thinking to boring, rule-filled sectors.” Never a conformist, “It’s much more fun to do things differently,” she smiles.
