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Kelly Fryer
Executive Director, FinTech Sandbox
Age: 31
Industry experience: 9 years
FinTech Sandbox had expected to welcome thousands of people to Boston this week for its fourth annual FinTech Week. But despite the pandemic – the conference has been rescheduled until March 2021 – the nonprofit still has big news: a new executive director in the person of Kelly Fryer.
FinTech Sandbox provides data to startup firms, and Fryer started her career as a data analyst and a project leader in Bloomberg LP’s global data department. After studying at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for an MBA, with a focus on corporate innovation and venture capital, Fryer spent three years at New York-based Techstars. As program director of an accelerator programs for early stage startups, Fryer worked with fintech founders while also cultivating a community of mentors, investors and enterprises.
Q: Why did you decide to join FinTech Sandbox?
A: This role as executive director of FinTech Sandbox is this exciting collision of all my past experiences coming together. Because of Techstars, I understand how early stage fintechs operate and their needs and challenges, especially when it comes to working with enterprises. Several of my Techstars portfolio companies are also FinTech Sandbox companies, so it’s great to have that overlap in the startups, and I know the ecosystem so well at this point.
From my time with Bloomberg, I’ve seen the financial data from the provider’s side and engaged on a daily basis with many of the major data providers that FinTech Sandbox works with. When FinTech Sandbox founders Sarah Biller and David Jegen reached out about the opportunity to be the new executive director, it was just this incredible opportunity to work with and learn from such smart, generous, collaborative people that I had to say yes.
Q: What are you most looking forward to in your new role?
A: I’m looking forward to our Boston FinTech Week in March and all of our great events leading up to it. I think FinTech Sandbox has done such an amazing job putting on great events. Our theme for Boston FinTech Week is “Financial Services for Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime,” which I think is just so apt and relevant today.
The second thing I’m looking forward to is growing our presence, building that same brand awareness across other fintech hubs and startup ecosystems beyond Boston, beyond Massachusetts, beyond the Northeastern United States. That way FinTech Sandbox and our network can continue to better support our entrepreneurs.
Q: What are your top priorities as executive director?
A: My top priorities are really to plan for the next iteration of FinTech Sandbox. The company started back in 2014 when fintech wasn’t really a known term the way that it is today, and I think fintech has evolved so much. The data needs and trends were different at that time. For me coming in, it’s this exciting time for the organization to really shift gears and move with the markets to better support fintech entrepreneurs and really grow our impact on the ecosystem.
Q: Do you have any priorities for the fintech industry more broadly?
A: As I think about the future of fintech and where the industry is going, I think access to data continues to be a challenge for early stage fintechs, just because the type of data needs to continuously evolve. So today, it’s much more unstructured data, consumer behavior data, alternative data sources, which can be really challenging to access and challenging to take in a usable way for an early company. That data doesn’t come in this nice, neat box that you can just open and go and run with.
Q: What are some other challenges fintech is facing right now?
A: The year of 2020 and all that it’s brought with it has really put this spotlight on gaps in our financial offerings in the country. From the payment side, you saw how slow it was to get individuals their relief checks or get small businesses their PPP loans. You’re seeing unbanked and underbanked populations now really being blocked out of an increasingly cashless society as people have health concerns with handling cash. And with the wildfires in California and social movements everywhere, you have companies that now have ESG initiatives and mandates that really need to track and deliver on those metrics. Fintechs seem to really be the ones taking on those challenges and trying to fill those gaps, and I think we’re going to see a lot of really interesting technologies bubble up over the next few months or year that are a direct result of some of the issues that we’re seeing right now.
Q: What are some opportunities for fintechs?
A: I think one is directly tied to this idea of more inclusive banking and lending products that match our current time: whether that be alternative data factoring into your credit score, like paying for your monthly subscriptions on time, or not requiring a minimum balance, or banking and lending models for health care, or joint bank accounts that are more structured to match today’s multigenerational households and nonmarried households. I think there are a lot of interesting opportunities and possibilities on more of the inclusive growth and inclusive finance side of the equation.
Q: What are some opportunities for helping women and people of color in the fintech landscape?
A: On more of a personal level, helping women founders and founders of color, especially within the fintech landscape and ecosystem to get better access and introductions across the network, is personally very important to me – making sure that they’re getting access to meetings, that they’re getting access to [venture capitalists] and not being overlooked or being posed harder questions than their peers.
But I’d say also from a FinTech Sandbox standpoint, we really think the future is sustainable finance, and one pillar of sustainable finance is that inclusion piece, which means serving underserved markets and creating processes that promote access and are affordable to the populations. I think part of that – a lot of that honestly – comes from underrepresented founders and founders who have been right in those situations and know problems firsthand and now are building these innovative solutions to try and solve that.
Fryer’s Five Favorite Shows to Binge-Watch:
- West Wing
- Schitt’s Creek
- Parks and Recreation
- High Fidelity
- Umbrella Academy
