Welcome back to the “Latinas in Tech” TV show coming to you “live” and direct from The FACTory in downtown snOrrrrrlando starring Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots®!
Tonight’s fabulous guest Femmebot is Barbara Negron, Senior Director of Embedded Finance, Business Development, and Strategic Partnerships at Fidelity Information Services (FIS). Welcome Barbara!!
What kind of tech do you use for your job/work?
I work for a fintech company. Our role is primarily banking software and financial payments and everything in the financial space. It's called FIS, one of the largest global fintechs in the world.
I do strategic partnerships and business development in a space that's called embedded finance in our platforms division. A lot of the technology that I use is around presentations whether it be Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, Canva, and of course tracking tools like Salesforce. Now what I found to be very helpful is in the last couple of months is ChatGPT. I use a lot of AI to refine a lot of my presentations and discussion points.
Who was your bisabuela?
My bisabuela’s name was Irene. She moved from Puerto Rico to New York in the late 1910s. She left Ponce, Puerto Rico and moved to New York City with my bisabuelo. They had five children and — fun fact — they would travel back to Puerto Rico to give birth and then come back to New York to raise their kids. “West Side Story” is fairly relevant to my life because it reminds me of how my family grew up in the city. My great uncle was in politics in New York. As a teenager I moved back to Puerto Rico for a couple of years. I was always seen as a gringa because I wasn't born in Puerto Rico.
So I would call my bisabuela a little bit of a hustler. She did a little sewing and a little bit of work inside the house, but she was a very proud Latina you know so she was very adamant about how she would dress and how her children dressed…so people wouldn't look down on them. She was over a hundred when she passed away. She always had her red lipstick because that was a signature trait to always be made up. She instilled that in a lot of us. As you can see I wear red lipstick myself.
What do you see for the future of Orlando - like if we were the location of a sci-fi movie in the year 2050?
One of the things that I struggled with when I first moved to Orlando was our lack of public transportation. I remember as a child going to Disney and seeing the monorail and and space mountain. I was like, “How could this city not have advanced transportation?” This summer I went to Japan and Korea and the technology there is amazing — like the bullet train in Tokyo. I just see us (Orlando) being a hub that connects our great Florida cities whether it be Tampa or Miami through some hyper train or monorails across the city. Maybe at some point we'll get some flying car that we can start using outside of that. I just want us to see us advance our transportation. I'm really passionate about some green technology and solar.
Have you taken the Brightline yet?
I have. I mean it's good, the train is great but I would like to have some type of system once you get off the train to get around (more comfy than Lynx). I never saw Orlando as a walking city and I think it's probably because of the weather, and the heat, you know people don't like to walk around, but in Asia last summer they have bus stops with air conditioning and they're closed off. There's cameras and everybody feels safe. I mean crime is not a thing there but everybody gets around because not everybody has cars. And the cities are small and they're so well populated that they need to have this type of transportation.
Why is it important for Latinas to do tech work?
For me, diverse teams — whether it be Latinas and women in tech — lead to more innovative solutions. With diversity you get different perspectives. We get different thought processes and different experiences. I think that drives a lot of the innovation that we need.
Seeing Latinas in tech roles I think inspire the next generation and break down the typical stereotypes of technology that we see. I work in an organization where there's not a lot of Latinas in tech though we do have some very senior members. That makes me very proud.
I also think economic opportunity is important. And I'll take it back to your first question. When my bisabuela went to New York it was because of the economic opportunity. You know when you think about how people migrate to this country and especially for Latinas where at one time we weren't given the same precedence as men in the industry, tech jobs offer higher salaries and growth potential for us.
So it helps us to close that economic gap.
And then of course, I think Latinas can make a cultural impact in the industry, like making sure that our technology's solutions are more inclusive. We consider the diverse needs of our community, we’re not one-sided, and we are able to view outside the box.
By giving our perspective it makes our technology become a little bit more open for inclusion for others.
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