Brigid's career began on Wall Street at a high frequency trading and investment research firm. From there, she went to Columbia Business School with ideas of getting into real estate, but after one summer in real estate private equity she knew that wasn’t for her. For Brigid, startups felt like the final frontier. After interning briefly at a Series A insurtech startup, she landed her first full-time fintech role in business development at MoneyLion. After MoneyLion, she spent 3.5 years building and scaling partnerships at digital mortgage lender Better.com, during which time the average mortgage rate went from 2% to 7% and company headcount fluctuated by ~10k. Talk about a roller coaster! Each of these experiences prepared her to take her earliest stage role yet, in a different vertical of fintech, leading business development for MoneyKit.
MoneyKit is the next generation connection for the world’s money, built by founders from Cash App and Quovo (Plaid acquired). The company has built a universal access platform for aggregating financial data from multiple sources, facilitating the highest level of connection success, institution coverage, and data quality for partners in fintech, banking, and more. MoneyKit is extremely product and design-forward as a company, and therefore ensuring that their partners have an impeccable experience with Moneykit's technology and that partners' end users love their UX guides every decision they make. The company is also fanatical about data privacy, security and consent and as a team, are really excited to see the industry move toward more open and inclusive standards of data access.
MoneyKit is solving well known problems in data aggregation and bringing a new category to market. In a space with several legacy players and a ~50% failure rate, there is plenty of room for improvement. Brigid loves sitting at this layer of the technology infrastructure landscape because she and her team get to work with companies of all shapes, sizes, and missions and really influence how the world interacts with money.
As Head of Business Development, meeting new people is paramount to Brigid, as she is always trying to foster new connections, whether or not those can directly benefit the business. She loves introducing interesting, accomplished people to other interesting, accomplished people. To the extent that she can help or lift up other women in Fintech, Brigid always keeps an eye out for those opportunities. And as much as she has developed a technical understanding over the years, business will always be relationships-driven.
Brigid has found her new role to be incredibly challenging and rewarding—to learn a new piece of the industry, new technology, new terminology, new sales cycle, new ecosystem of players, new regulation and more. She loves the learning curve and not at all afraid of admitting what she does not know. She learns by doing and tries to treat each person she comes into contact with (advisors, colleagues, competition, customers) as an opportunity to educate herself and get better.
More on Brigid
Where you currently live: Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY
Hometown: Larchmont, NY
Favorite hobby: Walking around Brooklyn
Favorite show to binge: Currently, Suits or The Great British Baking Show
Favorite Fintech Media: I love my LinkedIn feed! I am shameless about following people who impress me and you can get tons of snackable content on leadership, industry trends, news, and people supporting each other. Shoutout to Stephany Kirkpatrick, Founder and CEO at Orum, who does an amazing job of posting engaging, relevant content. I’m trying to get better about this myself!
What are you excited about Fintech this year? What is a trend that you are seeing in your vertical? What developments do you see in FinTech in the future?
I never thought I would say this but regulation! We’re at a really crucial moment in time where the CFPB has called for universal standards for data access, privacy protections, and inclusive industry practices. MoneyKit is the platform to bring these standards to market. We want fintechs to be able to focus on their core business, without worrying about industry politics. At MoneyKit, we facilitate a meritocracy of data access, quality, and coverage, and can future-proof our partners from shake ups in a space that is notoriously finicky.
What is one piece of advice someone told you that resonated with you that can give to other women in FinTech?
My uncle once told me that if you are not learning, it is over. I completely agree that continued learning is the best way to ensure you're still growing in your career. Every headache, challenge, and painful day on the job is a learning opportunity. Coming up the curve is the fun part and I like to reframe it as “I get to solve these problems.”
What's the best job decision you ever made?
Though it is sometimes devalued in startup circles, getting my MBA was an incredible experience and I would not be where I am today without it. Beyond that, a decision I make continuously is to not cling too tightly to any role, person, company, or outcome—especially in tech, especially in a down market. Change is the only constant and you have to be able to roll with the punches and trust that you are doing your best.
Can you tell us about a time someone encouraged you to try a task or take on a project you didn’t think that you would know how to do/or be good at?
Mastering my imposter syndrome is a continuous effort. There have been countless times when I felt like I was failing in a certain area of my job and my wonderful executive coach points out that we cannot be unbiased judges of ourselves. In these moments, it is helpful to look for external evidence to the contrary—one small win here, a colleague saying “nice job” there. At the end of the day, I am most proud of my accomplishments that came to be despite fear of the unknown.
What is the most important lesson you have learned from a mistake you’ve made in the past?
Own it. There is nothing more professional than accountability. It projects self assuredness, honesty, leadership potential and is something I always filter for when hiring.
Do you have any productivity hacks? What keeps you motivated? How do you maintain a work/life balance?
Admittedly, there are weeks I am terrible at this. My to-do list in Notion is the bible and a great Work-From-Home playlist never hurts. These things and being consistent with my morning routine make me feel grounded despite any chaos that comes up during the day.
Daily Diary
6:00am: My alarm goes off. I do not take my phone off the nightstand until I have meditated, worked out (generally yoga or pilates), and turned on the shower. I have absolutely become that girl but this time is sacred to me and nothing has a more positive impact on my mental health. If anything blows up overnight the right people know how to reach me, otherwise, it can wait.
8:30am: Drink a smoothie, do the NYT Wordle and Connections, and watch Good Morning America
9:00am: Sit down at my desk (at home or in our Brooklyn office) for a day that inevitably looks different than the last. I spend 50-60% of my time making sure new business opportunities are progressing in the pipeline. That could mean prospecting, scheduling demos, sending follow-up materials, drawing up and negotiating contracts, and meeting with partners. 20-30% of my time is spent on higher level, strategic opportunities such as partnerships with our underlying data providers, large financial institutions, regulators etc. The remainder of my time is spent shoring up the business functions of an early stage company. Think onboarding, account management, billing, planning and whatever other hat I need to wear that day!
12:30pm: Eat a salad, sometimes homemade but currently on a Sweetgreen/Cava rotation. I usually try to get through some of the industry news that comes to my inbox while I’m chewing. I like Fortune’s The Broadsheet and StrictlyVC.
1:00-6:30pm: More meetings, generally a 70/30 split of external vs. internal.
6:30-8:30pm: You are equally as likely to find me on the couch, at dinner with friends, or at a networking happy hour in NYC. There are so many fantastic events in the city I try to make it to at least one each week.
9:30pm: Scroll TikTok. I love it. I can’t help myself.
10:00pm: Phone down, lights off, hopefully asleep by 10:30pm!
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