There isn’t any more personal than our personal health and our personal finances. I’ve spent the majority of my career helping people with both, making hard conversations more approachable and taking the stigma out of asking for help. It’s through this process that I discovered my passion for helping others by building a relationship based on trust and support. 

While hackers target all financiers, local and community banks are becoming more frequent marks…and email attacks are a weapon of choice.  The truth is cyber bank theft is a daily occurrence, and the rate of breaches at financial services institutions (FSIs) has tripled in the past five years. According to a recent study by Accenture, a bank encounters about 85 cyber attacks each year. 

When I was a freshman in college at the University of Maryland, I met my roommate and future co-founder, Abb Kapoor. We both attended school on full scholarships, mine being a Bill Gates scholarship I’d worked incredibly hard to secure. After our freshman year, we started our search for off-campus housing to share. Abb and I had enough money to cover the expenses, but we came upon the same roadblock over and over. We didn’t have established credit scores, and therefore couldn’t secure housing. 

Brands must reach consumers where they are — today it’s all about social media. Consumers want to hear a brand’s social voice, not the cut-and-dried one on TV commercials and billboards. In your quest to grab consumers’ attention in this distraction-heavy media landscape, build that social voice by letting your employees speak for your brand on social media. It’s called social selling and it works.

The idea for the company came to me when I was working in a hospital and was called in for a procedure. One day, we had a tough case that according to the doctor wasn’t looking good. After what seemed like a successful procedure, the patient’s pressure started dropping, and as it turned out, there was a lot of bleeding that we could not stop. The patient died as I was standing right there. As I was leaving the hospital, I walked past the patient’s family who were still unaware that their loved one had died. I remember all their legs and feet, and remember thinking the condition had a very strong family history component to it, which meant some of the family members had the same condition. 

It was a privilege to hear from five entrepreneurs participating in the 2019 FIS Fintech Accelerator program and as they shared insights on how to thrive in the fast-paced pursuit of startups. Each entrepreneur shared candid advice on how to navigate professional relationships, challenge self development by breaking out of their comfort zone and staying proactive as they scale. For those who missed this informative session, we’ve compiled a list of their top book recommendations that have shaped how they work and succeed personally and professionally.

For an early stage company like my start-up, Digital Onboarding, being part of a program that fosters the relationship between 60+ bank partners is truly the opportunity of a lifetime. We have a great product to sell and the business development opportunity for Digital Onboarding at the FIS Accelerator Program is something our whole company is really excited about.

Motivating people and finding ways for them to start investing earlier makes a huge difference, which is where Voleo comes in. I used to be an investment banker and after consulting to startups for several years, I saw a prototype of Voleo. It was exactly what I needed when I was younger, with a fun twist we call DROID (definitive return on investment decisions), so we took the concept and developed a social trading platform that makes it easy for anyone to start investing by pooling their money and building teams with friends and family.

My brother Nick and I were born two years apart, and were raised in Chicago. Our mom was a hardworking single mom who had her own cleaning business. We grew up understanding what it was like to work, to really work. At ten years old, we learned to shovel lots of snowy Chicago driveways to earn money. Later we started a landscape business, and Nick even started an e-commerce business. We’ve always built businesses together, and have relied on each other as all around trusted partners.

The Venture Center is dedicated to helping professionals in all stages of their careers grow. As we have already kicked off the 2019 program, and are hearing great feedback from those who were accepted this year, we thought we’d share the top questions that have been most helpful. Although you might not be participating in our program this year, we highly encourage finding mentors for your professional and personal growth. Here are a few questions we’ve borrowed from Forbes that our mentees have found helpful when meeting with theirs.