Lisa Weil
Title: Vice President of Industry Solutions, ProcessUnity
Age: 48
Experience: 25 total, 8 in technology and 17 in financial services
Lisa Weil’s career has spanned multiple industries, and she just keeps going. Weil got her start as a consultant for a software company, but eventually switched over to the financial services sector when she began working for Fidelity Investments. She then left the corporate world to work from home for a spell and found her own consulting firm, where she originally thought she would return to the technology sector. But after the financial crash, Weil’s phone started ringing off the hook when former colleagues turned to her for help. Weil recently joined risk management software solutions company ProcessUnity as its vice president of industry solutions, and after this interview, she was named to the SPARK Institute’s board of directors in Washington, D.C.
Q: Can you describe your shift from software to financial services?
A: What a huge change. It was a real culture change, in terms of going from a creative, innovative, environment without a lot of red tape and regulatory oversight in the software industry, to one where I logged onto my computer and was immediately reminded every day that every word I typed in could be audited by the SEC, FINRA or any other regulatory agency.
But I learned the business from the perspective of Fidelity’s financial services institute. And I really had a phenomenal 12 years with them and worked across all businesses.
Q: Tell me about some of your more notable accomplishments in Fidelity’s retirement division.
A: Back in the day, around 1999, there were actually plan sponsors who would send in tape and diskette for their employees’ contribution, and people would be in the back office actually typing that in. We were the first to launch a website for them to just send that information to us online, before most people even knew that they could use the Internet for things like that.
It was one thing to get the technology up and working, but what I spent a lot of time doing after that was really working with a lot of our plan sponsors to help them understand what the Internet even was and how that was going to change the way we did business with them. It took a little while to get it rolling and make some enhancements to it, but it was a pretty exciting time for the firm.
After that, I worked on projects like making 401(k) balances available on the Palm Pilots. This almost sounds like I’m dating myself, like this was thousands of years ago, but so much has happened in just a 10-year span.
Also, when I took over the product line, my goals were set to dramatically reduce our costs to the tune of about 15 to 20 percent and to do that by standardizing a lot of the offers we were providing to these sponsors. Traditionally, everything was customized. That was great at the point of sale, but over the years, it just became unsustainable.
Q: Did you get any push back from those plan sponsors?
A: We got some push back, but I think that’s because initially we tried to position it as a way to reduce costs. That wasn’t really a benefit for them, it was a benefit for Fidelity. So we needed to translate that into: what are you paying for these services? And how can we really make that cost more predictable, so it wasn’t going up every year? And that worked. That worked really well.
Q: Why did you eventually decide to leave your consulting firm and come to work at ProcessUnity?
A: I kept hearing the same problems over and over. The real attraction was that I really feel there’s a strong need for a service like this. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around a lot of innovative companies and groups, so this to me was a very innovative company.
And we have an opportunity to solve those problems in a very scalable way. As a consultant, there’s really only so much you can do as one person, so I really liked the idea of being able to pour some of the ideas not only of myself, but also the needs of the clients into a platform and then let it help solve many more problems. Q: Can you describe your shift from software to financial services?
A: What a huge change. It was a real culture change, in terms of going from a creative, innovative, environment without a lot of red tape and regulatory oversight in the software industry, to one where I logged onto my computer and was immediately reminded every day that every word I typed in could be audited by the SEC, FINRA or any other regulatory agency.
But I learned the business from the perspective of Fidelity’s financial services institute. And I really had a phenomenal 12 years with them and worked across all businesses.
Q: Tell me about some of your more notable accomplishments in Fidelity’s retirement division.
A: Back in the day, around 1999, there were actually plan sponsors who would send in tape and diskette for their employees’ contribution, and people would be in the back office actually typing that in. We were the first to launch a website for them to just send that information to us online, before most people even knew that they could use the Internet for things like that.
It was one thing to get the technology up and working, but what I spent a lot of time doing after that was really working with a lot of our plan sponsors to help them understand what the Internet even was and how that was going to change the way we did business with them. It took a little while to get it rolling and make some enhancements to it, but it was a pretty exciting time for the firm.
After that, I worked on projects like making 401(k) balances available on the Palm Pilots. This almost sounds like I’m dating myself, like this was thousands of years ago, but so much has happened in just a 10-year span.
Also, when I took over the product line, my goals were set to dramatically reduce our costs to the tune of about 15 to 20 percent and to do that by standardizing a lot of the offers we were providing to these sponsors. Traditionally, everything was customized. That was great at the point of sale, but over the years, it just became unsustainable.
Q: Did you get any push back from those plan sponsors?
A: We got some push back, but I think that’s because initially we tried to position it as a way to reduce costs. That wasn’t really a benefit for them, it was a benefit for Fidelity. So we needed to translate that into: what are you paying for these services? And how can we really make that cost more predictable, so it wasn’t going up every year? And that worked. That worked really well.
Q: Why did you eventually decide to leave your consulting firm and come to work at ProcessUnity?
A: I kept hearing the same problems over and over. The real attraction was that I really feel there’s a strong need for a service like this. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around a lot of innovative companies and groups, so this to me was a very innovative company.
And we have an opportunity to solve those problems in a very scalable way. As a consultant, there’s really only so much you can do as one person, so I really liked the idea of being able to pour some of the ideas not only of myself, but also the needs of the clients into a platform and then let it help solve many more problems.
Lisa Weil’s Top Five Industry Resources:
- The SPARK Institute
- Ignite’s Financial Time Service
- PlanSponsor.com
- The Harvard Business Review
- " The Product Manager’s Handbook," by Linda Gorchel
