Looking Back and Looking Ahead - A FinTech Exec's Career Journey

Maureen Welcome to Tech on Deck podcast brought to you by Fidelity Investments. I'm your host, Maureen Olejarz. CIO of Enterprise Software Engineering. Adam And I'm Adam Ely Head of Digital Products and Engineering. Adam Each episode takes listeners inside the walls of a fintech industry. Maureen Anything from cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, cloud and crypto to the intersection of product and technology. Adam Tech on Deck breaks down the topics top of mind for technologists today. Maureen Plus, we'll give you insight into the exciting and challenging careers in fintech. Maureen Welcome back to another episode of Tech on Deck. I'm Maureen Olejarz head of software engineering at Fidelity. Adam And I'm Adam Ely, Head of Digital Products and Engineering. Today, we're excited to sit down and talk to Mike Wilens. Mike is Fidelity's President of Enterprise Services. Mike, welcome to the show. Good to see you. Mike Well, thanks, Adam and Maureen. Adam So, Mike, you know, we’ve talked about your career in the past and I think the listeners are going to really enjoy this this episode today. But your background is kind of amazing. You went from graduating at MIT with engineering and comp sci degree to working in Europe for a few years, creating software companies, being a CEO and a CTO. Adam Ultimately, you've been here, you know, 15 or so years, helping really grow the business and even more so in your in your current role now as President of Enterprise Services. I don't even know where to start, but I guess to to find a point to kind of dive in. Can you start at the beginning a little bit and maybe tell us what motivated you down the degree or the career path in technology and what kind of kept you down that path all these years? Mike Yeah. So, when I started out, computers were a new thing and I decided, even though I didn't know a lot about them, I wanted to be a computer scientist. I applied to MIT, got in. My parents thought that everybody around me thought that was the Michigan Institute of Technology. But to their surprise, I got an airplane, went to Massachusetts, and I was going to be an academic and got a couple of degrees at MIT in, you know, electrical engineering and computer science, that's what it was then. Mike And then went to Michigan to work on my doctorate in chaos theory and linguistic computational linguistics. But what happened was we ended up with some research contracts and Unix was a new thing back then.Bell Labs had just released it into the wild. You could get copies of it. And so a bunch of us left the university and started our first business. Mike We were all writing compilers and all kinds of heavy-duty software stuff, but I ended up being the one that kind of more organized things and we'll talk family later, but I have three younger brothers, so I'm oldest brother, so I guess that's just my role. And and so we got this company called “Cosi” going back, back in the early eighties, early eighties, grew it pretty big and eventually sold off parts of it and stuff to Sun Microsystems. Mike And that's how I got into the business world. And I would alternate kind of back and forth between the business side and staying on the tech side, because that's still my first love. Maureen So, Mike, that's really interesting. I wanted to explore a little bit. I know that will go further into the business side of things as we go through your career, But for our listeners out there, some of the younger technologists, as you look back on that, what would you give them as advice? Mike Well, the way I look at it is if you think of the world career as a two-dimensional graph, you have one dimension, call it the Y dimension is kind of business leadership, that kind of stuff. And the X dimension is technical expertise. You can be fine if you go up either of those all the way to the end, but the win is to go up the diagonal and to work on both. Mike And if you look at the senior leaders of Fidelity, you'll see them going back and forth up the diagonal of that. But I do warn you, it's nice to think of that diagonal as a nice smooth line, but it's not. It's very, very bumpy. Okay. You'll go to the left to go to the right, and the lesson is to go up the diagonal, but to have a lot of flexibility and curiosity, because that's sort of what drives it. Mike That would be sort of the thing that that I've always told people. Maureen Love it. Thanks. Adam It's amazing. Like, I think that's such great advice now. I wish it was always a smooth line and easy line in one direction, but I guess this is not how life is. Mike talk in your early career you know fascinating if we if you pull forward to current day when I think about the roles across Fidelity there's all these technology roles, all these business roles that I think are fascinating. Adam But if anybody says what's the most interesting role, I always point to your role as President of Enterprise Services. You just have this role that fascinates me with all the things that you're doing. Can you tell our listeners a bit about that? What what that role is, what it really entails? Mike Yeah. So Enterprise Services, it's really a collection of activities that are oriented towards growth but not incremental growth. Incremental growth is the core of the business. It's embedded in the business units. They're very good at that. How do we get 6% more sales, 5% more customers, expand sales for, Yeah, that is the and by the way, that's not easy to do and that's required. Mike Its own form of innovation. So I'm not dissing that in the slightest. And at one point in my life I had to run a big division and I had to be charge of incremental growth and realize how hard that is to do. I did that for ten years and I said, I'm not doing that anymore. Furthermore, non-incremental growth because it's actually less of a grind and requires a different set of skills. Mike So enterprise services is the non-incremental growth. So, I'll give you a few examples of things that people know about we did this move into the cloud, I don't know, five years ago we started the march. Mike It was necessary. I think we were about the right time, maybe a little ahead of our time, and it's gone reasonably well. That's a huge project. And as every software engineer knows, projects that size have a way of going sideways. Mike I went to Jorge Nario and said to him, I want to give you a task which is to build a cloud nativesystem. No batch, no proprietary software Mike And Jorge actually ended up building something which became the core for oursystem. It turned out that the legacy system can only keep two decimal places of accuracy in his batch oriented overnight processing system and his can keep nine digits, So what I learned there is you're constantly pivoting, learning, turning 30 degrees, trying this, and that's what makes my job the best in the company. Mike So I have to agree with you Adam. Adam Absolutely. Maureen And maybe if I just jump in there and add to that, because that's that's really amazing. And, you know, Mike, I'm hearing some things about. Right. You talked about business ideas, innovation, pivoting, experimentation, that continuous learning and really going out there, I guess, on the edge, you know, for certain things, just to try them out. Right, because you can always back up. Maureen Can we go to two of the business groups that you currently lead? The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology and what's called Fidelity Labs, which are both incubators that we have and with products and approaches that we would consider to be tech forward. How do you how would you talk about your business background in technology and how do you continue to inspire and drive those teams? Mike Well, first of all, I'm extremely fortunate to have incredibly good team members who are self-motivated And they can they take it 100 miles an hour once they go. So, the probably the big thing, though, is these are very self-motivated people who really have an idea sometimes, you know, they're as curious about everything. I think of FCAT as something that is looking at 3 to 5 years and beyond and more internally focused labs is looking at stuff that is kind of internal capabilities or requirements that then can be monetized in a new way. Mike Okay. But both of them require innovation labs, probably requires much more business savvy, and that's the challenge that Labs has FCAT requires a bit more technology, but that's how those those work. But it's really the people that go there. They're kind of magical people. Adam It's great. Adam Kind of amazing. So do you have tech predictions over the next 10 to 5 years of what you think is is new in next in the fintech industry or maybe adjacent that helps the fintech or the financial services space? Mike No, I actually don't. I'm you know, if anybody Adam, I think you your predictions are are as good as mine. I can tell you, though, what will still be true. Okay. I think technology will come in waves. I think we're at the kind of peak hype of this fifth wave of A.I., for example. Mike Okay. And it's not that there isn't big changes here, but, you know, we've been here before. This one is a little different because I think there have been some big changes in the quality. But I think core knowledge of systems integration, architectures security will always be critical skills to have as you go forward. Computer languages, not so much. Mike Okay. I think you've got to be pretty facile in changing those specific technologies on your desk. Not so much. Okay. I don't think you get attached to things. And to me, that's the difference between someone who's a amateur and someone who's a pro. A pro switches the equipment as the technology goes. Mike And if, you know, one thing I would tell people is if you want to stay as a practicing engineer, have a lot of geeky hobbies, that's absolutely critical. I can't tell you how many senior technical people I know to this day at very high levels build their own home automation systems Mike I set up my own networks using unity equipment and I use VPNs to connect them. I think it keeps you grounded as an engineer. I think that's a really important part of your life as we do this. And that's the way I think you get the next 5 to 10 years is you just stay in the game because, you know, look, some things stick around. Relational databases have been with us like I thought those things are going to be gone in like 20 years. Mike Okay. But they're they're not going anywhere. Well, you know, so I think some technologies will have 30 and 50 year cycles. I couldn't I couldn't tell you, you know what, what's going to be the disruptor and I'm speaking as an investor as much as an engineer. Maureen So Mike, let's pivot for a minute, and maybe just tell tell us about so you've been at Fidelity itself for the last 15 years and, you know, let's just talk about your journey. So often on the podcast. We like to tell people about their, that Fidelity, whether it's curiosity, learning, career growth, career pathing things of that nature, and maybe just walk through that and anything else you'd like to share in that space. Mike Sure. So, the way I got to Fidelity is kind of an interesting story. I had been the president of a big online division in Thomson Reuters called Westlaw. I was based originally in Minneapolis and then eventually at Stanford, and it competed against LexisNexis. Mike And then they bought Reuters, and I got to be the one who crunched that two organizations together. It was a horrible job. Mike Okay. That is it. You know, that goes back to there are people that are very good at that. Okay. Not that they like it, but they're very good at it. I, I didn't like it and I kind of suffered through that process. Mike But six months later, Fidelity called me and said you know, we noticed that you kind of were very involved in running Thompson Financial, which is a big information provider like Bloomberg to a lot of the people. What do you think about getting involved in running asset management? Mike Okay, that's a different kind of gig. But they said, you know, in general, in asset management, it's rare to find someone who can run money and run people.. And so I came here in that role, which was a radically different role for me. Mike I had done investing as a venture capitalist during my earlier career, and I knew private equity and venture capital, but public markets was new to me. And so I was on a learning curve. And I got to tell you, I thought, I can learn, you know, I'm a smart guy, okay? I can learn anything in 90 days. So I hit 90 days. Mike I okay, six months. I've got this code still on the learning curve because it was a learning curve that was bigger than anything I saw it. It was very humbling. But I really liked the company Mike You know, this is a crazy place, this public markets world. I think I'm going to go back into private equity, which is which is sane compared to this public markets. Mike And that's when I got about five years in. I switched over to the Devonshire side. And the since Devonshire is all startups and stuff like that, that's when they talk the other stuff in with it because that made sense and I've been doing that ever since. And it's like you said, it's a great job and fortunately, you know, we found some incredibly great people to run asset management who've done superb jobs with it. Mike But I was an example of early mobility. That's the way I look at it. Maureen That's right. Okay. Learning how to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Mike And the way I model it is when you find yourself on thin ice, there's two ways to respond. One is you either back up or start stomping carefully to see what the other one is. You run as fast as you can so that the ice doesn't break up underneath your feet. Okay. And we have both kinds at Fidelity, and I think that's a risk capacity. Mike So in addition to the third, the third dimension of that first graph that I started with, which is business savvy and technical savvy, there's a third dimension, which is risk appetite. And don't tell yourself you're high risk if you're not because you're just end up being really unhappy in life. Okay. Or low risk, you know, And I think those are the three axes that one triangulate is kind of a life trajectory on or at least a professional trajectory. Maureen Words, words to live by. I love it. Adam It's amazing. Amazing. So, Mike, you said you're you're an example of mobility within the company. It kind of leads me to a thought process. You know, we've been talking to kind of career trajectory and that the angle that people shoot at. What was that decision for you when you said, okay, I'm kind of going from more pure play tech kind of roles to the business side. Adam They either got you on that trajectory or got you maybe a little bit more over to one side of it. Mike Well, if you're a pure research scientists, think about it. You know, you're looking for the quest of knowledge. You're working with a few people. You're right. Your objective is writing papers and presenting and getting your ideas across. Then there's people who like to apply it. And I think a lot of engineers tend to be they like to see the solution in place working and benefiting, you know, the people and they get a real charge out of, you know, building something that's used by a lot of people that improves their life in some fashion. Mike It's a very short step from there into helping get the system in helping people convince people that this is the system that they want, advising them. So I think if it's you want to take what's engineering and science, but you want to see it in action and help people actually deploy it, I think that's the trajectory most engineers walk on and they find themselves, you know, leading the charge because the person who can actually handle the interpersonal relationships and all of the organizational dynamics to make that stuff happen tend to be the people who lead the projects and stuff, because that turns out to be the hard stuff. Mike A long time ago, I heard a phrase from a friend of mine who was a dean of the business school who said, “The soft stuff is the hard stuff”. And at first I thought, what a crock, because I was an engineer. What are you talking about? 12 real hard problems. That's the hard stuff. But as it turns out, as you get further in your career, you start to decide the soft stuff is in fact the hard stuff, motivating people, helping them move ahead, you know, And I will sort of come round and say, at this point in my career, most delightful stuff. Mike The most incredible feelings are seeing people like you, Adam, take over the CTO of a very critical bit, and being successful there, it's bringing the next generation of leadership along and the soft stuff is the hard stuff. And that's just sort of the light of the world at this point. Adam I mean, I'm using that. I'm stealing that from you. And then whoever you stole it from, like I've heard it from, I'm using that. I love that. Maureen So Mike wanted to just touch on a slightly different topic here. So when we think about talent pools, whether within Fidelity or in the marketplace, right, we're always seeking the best talent, right? How do we how do we get them on board? I'd love to be able to just get from you and hear your thoughts on why should technologists be interested in Fidelity. Mike Well, I think it's because we are such a technologically enabled company. 99 over 99% of our interactions with customers are digital. We are constantly looking to apply new technologies. And I think for a big company we have is, you know, vibrant an environment as you can get. Can we compete with a startup that's a different thing and you'd have to decide. Mike But I think even there we can compete. You just have to find the niches, like in labs or FCAT or something that has that kind of element to it. But remember, we are a big company and that means we do certain things that little companies don't do. So I think that's a really remarkable thing. I will tell you, one of the things that happens in a big company, and maybe this is a good way, one of my first startups essentially got acquired. Mike and I ended up going to this big company and I had to be there for a while. And as you know, when you sell a company, you got to stick with the thing for a while. And I had this new boss, wonderful lady who is the CEO. And I was going around to just changing stuff. Mike I didn't know the rules of. I mean, I had no corporate manners, okay? I didn't know how to use corporate forks or knives or napkins. Okay. Someone needed a bunch of PCs. I just called up someone I knew and had them ship in PCs. And then someone yelled at me about a purchase order, which I didn't even know what that was. Mike And my my new boss calls me in and she says, “You need corporate lessons.” And I said, Great. Okay. She goes, okay, lesson one. And she points to herself and she says, Me CEO. And then she points to me and she goes, “You not CEO, okay?” And we never got off that lesson. But the point being is, I think, you know, if A you're a be really good at your craft, be a great technologist, B, be in the front to solve the problem, be a good team member, but also be a good leader and look for opportunities to volunteer to solve hard problems. Mike Because if you can do that, regardless of what organization you are, you when you win. And if you do that, you also have the confidence that if this isn't the organization you should be in, go to a different organization. Okay? If you're a problem solver, I think those two kind of rules are hard to beat and and I would encourage it. Mike Now, I also use humor. So that depends if you're good. You know, I consider that just a pure add, but I can't say enough that just basic stuff is how you get ahead. Maureen Perfect. Thanks so much. Adam That's great. I'm sure our listeners will really appreciate all the advice you've given us. And Mike, it's, you know, last question, and I want to end on something a little bit more fun. So can you tell us something, a fun fact about yourself, maybe something we don't know or that would be interesting to the listeners? Mike Sure. To ex Fidelity colleagues. And this just tells you a little bit about Fidelity, who have retired recently. And I tend to pick adventures around the world. That is usual. We're always over our skis a little. So we did Patagonia, we did the Milford track and New Zealand, and we were going to walk across Nepal to the base camp. Mike And then one of us finally read the brochure that said, you know, you're like 19,000 feet. We're a bunch of old guys. Okay? So we decided one of us decided that death wasn't really on our agenda this year. So, so we redid it. Now we're walking across Bhutan. So in the next two weeks, I'm going to be spending two weeks walking across Bhutan. Mike So, we hike all these interesting places and, you know, hopefully I'll be back in a few weeks with another story to tell. Maureen Wonderful. Wonderful. Adam I think we're looking forward to that. Maureen Mike, thanks so much. It's been a pleasure. We've learned so much and I know this is going to be really valuable to a lot of people. Thank you. Mike Well, take care. And I wish you all the best and thanks for speaking with me today. Adam Thanks for joining us for Tech on Deck. We hope you enjoyed the episode if you haven't yet, please give us a five-star rating and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Maureen Thank you to our listeners and recording studio and editors who make our episodes possible. To learn more about tech opportunities, head over to Tech Dot Fidelity Careers Dot Com. Adam See you next time.