We like to build things here at FinTech Forge (thus our name). Historically the forge was where tangible, useful things were built; each iteration improving upon the last. One of the things we enjoy most about our work is building teams and their capabilities. As the number of financial institutions we serve continues to grow, we needed to grow our own team and capabilities.
To that end, we are pleased to announce that Trish North is joining us as Partner, where she will be creating new avenues of growth and developing new market strategies for the work we do to help financial institutions build and leverage their innovation capacity through strategic fintech partnerships and investments.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Trish for over a decade. Our first foray together was to transform a small, stagnant bank, and the financial service firm that just acquired it and was growing at breakneck speed. Together we solved the prioritization, operational, and compliance issues as we simultaneously plugged holes, made productivity leaps, and tested new business models.
Because Trish grew up in the banking world, she brought a depth of valuable operational and compliance expertise. Her intellectual curiosity and push for improvement made her the perfect partner as we embarked upon our intra-preneurial journey. Those strengths were also the reasons I later recruited her to PerkStreet to be our head of operations. As one of the world’s first digital only neo-banks, we were partnering with a diverse group simultaneously— banks to solve their need for core deposits, existing technology providers to get access to banking rails, and new technology providers to be a part of one of the first online only institutions. Trish was a critical to make this happen.
Trish then joined our PerkStreet co-founder Dan O’Malley at Eastern Bank in building their innovation lab, Eastern Labs. That later spun out as a stand-alone company Numerated Growth Technologies, a high growth e-commerce platform that helps banks drive profitable growth in digital lending . At both Eastern Labs and Numerated, her ability to bring entrepreneurship to traditional banking made her an invaluable asset for both sides of the partnership. “Trish was instrumental in our success partnering with banks,” said Dan O’Malley, former PerkStreet CEO and current Numerated CEO, “We look forward to working with her in her new role at FinTech Forge.”
We are thrilled to have Trish on our leadership team. We know her work with our venture partners, clients and strategic relationships will drive change in the industry.