Designing Communities for Women with Maria Potoroczyn
What led you to start WIN (Women in Innovation)?
“The recognition that gender inequity in the workplace does in fact exist. I think women enter the workforce mostly without assumptions about inequity existing. The realisation that behaviours, micro-aggressions, systemic issues, which I read about or heard about from others, actually exist came as surprise. It didn’t take me long to go from personal experience, to frustration, to productive dissent.
I suspect most women-centered organisations and businesses start off in that way — frustration on seeing a fundamental gap where a need has not been historically served.”
What have you learned about creating a community for women?
“The biggest lesson from WIN has been that if you want to create a generosity-driven community, make it a women-centric community. WIN, from day one, has operated on the basis of co-opetition — in early days competing innovation consultancies came together to co-produce programming. I also remember, in the early days, we would get questions (mostly from men in our lives) such as “why are you putting all your free time into this, what are you getting out of it?” We were doing it because it was needed.
Would it be gendered of me to say that this may be a pretty unique female quality — generosity and selflessness that I’ve seen in the many women who have touched and built WIN.”
How do your learnings from building WIN translate into designing for women in finance?
“Oh the number of financial services projects I’ve witnessed die on the vine that were aimed at female consumers… I don’t know what it is. There’s immense potential.
Women’s First Bank out of Chicago — seems like they will be the first and only commercial bank with a women’s centric value proposition. They want to focus on serving small and medium business owners who happen to be womxn. I’ve been watching their progress from afar and very impressed by the team they assembled so far. Ellevest is another great example of a fintech startup going after a female consumer — personally I love their product, my finances have thrived with the content as well as tools they provide. I love that they’re bridging into career coaching and personal development — it’s the right next step for them to build a platform business with value-add for their customers.
For large banks, it could be considered discriminatory to develop anything gender-specific. So, even if a product was created for women, it would never be marketed as such. That said — nothing I’ve seen has ever gone anywhere…
I think the issue starts with most research efforts in large banks not aimed at uncovering needs of historically underserved consumer groups, instead mostly centering on mass market consumer segments. Not shocking that we get “vanilla” banking products, if they originate with insights about “vanilla” consumer segments, right?”
What are some women’s-focused services that inspire you?
“Aside from fintechs that I’ve mentioned before, I think a lot of exciting things are happening in healthcare and mental health — like Maven, Paloma, Simple Health, Rory, REAL, Octave, Alma. Some of the issues they’re trying to solve are systemic and unique to U.S. but all of them take a female-centric lens. It’s a really interesting space that I have been exploring and experimenting in for my next venture.”
About Maria Potoroczyn
Maria Potoroczyn is Co-Founder of WIN: Women in Innovation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with an international mandate and a mission to close the gender gap in innovation. She is Head of Conversational AI at Citibank’s Global Consumer Bank, driving mission-critical initiatives in designing the future of financial services. Potoroczyn is passionate about fintech innovation and she prides herself at doing work that has a positive impact on consumers experience, while generating top line growth.