Lucy Grant

Your Story:

I started out my career in consulting working at Bain & Company in London, mainly in the Financial Services sector. Career highlights include working on the Bain & Company/Bain Capital Ventures report into embedded finance, and helping to lead Bain London’s LGBTQ+ graduate recruiting efforts. While at Bain, I also spent six months on secondment at Cleo AI, a fintech that helped its users make better financial decisions through an AI-powered chatbot. While at Cleo, I helped launch our first secured credit card, working across strategy, operations and partnerships.

Now a Senior Strategy and Business Development Manager at Tink, I work in a cross-functional role across both the product and sales teams to drive our account-to-account payments strategy with fintech customers. I am dedicated to driving greater financial inclusion and the potential for technology to lower the barriers to entry in consumers’ financial lives.

Additionally, I spent 10 years playing lacrosse for England during and after university, winning two European Championship gold medals.

Your Impact:

In my career to-date, I’ve tried to seek out different ways to explore and drive a more inclusive financial system. For example, making finance an embedded part of user’s everyday experiences at Bain, making finance less scary and more fun at Cleo and now at Tink, expanding the ways in which people can pay. This is an even more critical and a personal mission, knowing that the LGBTQIA+ community has lower trust in the financial services system, irrespective of age or income.

Working at Cleo, I helped launch its first secured credit card, to help users build their credit scores. Cleo thinks about finance in a whole different way to the norm, and I loved working on how a sassy chatbot could de-mystify your spending habits, and help you make better financial decisions.

In my role at Tink, I am thinking about how new payment methods like Pay by Bank can change the way consumers pay. As part of Visa, we’ve got the scale now to make a meaningful difference across the world - this is super exciting for me as part of driving change in the financial services system.

In terms of advocating internally, while at Bain I was part of our Pride network and co-led our LGBTQIA+ graduate recruiting efforts, hosting events for graduates to learn more about life at Bain and within our Pride network.

At Tink, I’ve co-founded and led our Women at Tink network, which we kicked off first in the UK, and then rolled out to other offices across Europe, including Sweden and Poland. Witnessing Tink's period of intensive growth since I joined a year ago, I recognised the importance of building a supportive structure for our expanding team, and it became evident that we could improve our sense of community.

We wanted to keep it easy to start and open to everyone, creating a feedback loop starting from these initial conversations into the People and Leadership teams, as well as the wider organisation to say we know this is something we want to be better at. We have looked to address the tangible things that we can change quickly (e.g. more flexible working arrangements, social events and activities to help bond as a community) and what we should be focusing on in the long-term (improving the diversity in our talent pipeline across all levels of the organisation).

Your Advice:

My biggest learning (and in turn advice!) is how important it is to bring your whole self to the office, and how this empowers you to do your best work. So I’d make sure you seek out places and environments to work in that allow you to do this - be that doing your extra due diligence on the culture of an organisation, or joining an internal or external affinity group.

I have also learnt how willing folks in the fintech space are to share their time and advice - if there are people working on things that you admire, don’t be afraid to reach out and show interest or ask for a coffee.