Beyond Yourself, Entrepreneurship Edition
In the early 2000s, investments banks increasingly used electronic trading to give clients faster access to liquidity in global equity markets. Jan Shelly Brown helped make it all happen.
“I started my career with Goldman Sachs, essentially helping them trade faster,” says Brown, now a partner at McKinsey & Company. “Electronic trading was coming at scale, and I helped them streamline office processes.”
Two decades later, Brown continues to help financial institutions modernize technology, like using cloud computing, for example, and through tech-enabled risk management and compliance.
A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Brown says she grew up in an engineering-centric culture. So it was no surprise that she’d follow her passion—computer science—in college and later, in her career. Serving as a CIO was a dream, but the job requires a grounding in both tech and business to make strategic decisions that will advance business value, she says. Realizing this, Brown decided to enroll at Haas.
Her training has served her well. Humans can be notoriously fickle when it comes to change, especially of the technological variety. But Brown is there to ease transitions. “You’ve got to explain to people what the change is and then incentivize them to want to do it,” she says.
As one of a handful of Black female technologists, Brown sees diversity as invaluable toward meeting the needs of her clients. “Diverse perspectives and collective experiences create the strongest answers. I seek people who celebrate that, and my solutions are always reflective of the teams that I’m part of.”
linkedin.com/in/janshellybrown
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