The latest episode of The Leaders’ Room podcast features Lorna Martyn, Ireland site lead and senior VP of technology management at Fidelity Investments. This series is created in partnership with IDA Ireland.
In season three of The Leaders’ Room podcast, we are once again getting to know the leaders of some of the most influential multinationals in tech, life sciences and innovation, as well as getting insights into their leadership styles and industry trends they see coming down the line.
In this episode, we speak to Lorna Martyn, Ireland site lead and senior VP, technology management at Fidelity Investments, a financial services company that employs 77,000 people worldwide and has had operations in Ireland for almost 30 years.
Being a privately-owned financial services giant, Martyn says this has given Fidelity Investments the freedom to innovate and to think strategically longer term.
In a wide-ranging interview, Martyn discusses Fidelity’s growth in Ireland, how they design technology and services for their future customers, and about Lorna’s own impressive leadership journey. We also got to chat about how everything from quantum to cryptography is the company’s sights.
With innovation at its heart, Fidelity works at that intersection between technology and financial services. Indeed Martyn says she often likes to describe it as a “technology company embedded in a financial services company”.
“We service the US business here from Ireland, so everything from asset managers to our digital assets business, and we’re constantly looking at the day to day in terms of how we can bring new thoughts, innovations, technology into solving those current problems.
“And then within Fidelity we would also have what we call our Fidelity Centre for Applied Technology (FCAT) and that is a group that’s really focused on researching the future, really bringing outside-in thinking, driving some very provocative conversations internally in terms of what the future of our business might look like.”
Martyn shares some great lessons on good leadership that include the ability to share your vision “from all altitudes”, self-awareness, resilience, lifelong learning and the importance of being human in our dealings with others. “It’s what differentiates us from the machines,” she says, rather appropriately. She is also a keen advocate for designing technology to meet our needs, rather than for the sake of it.
It is also fascinating to hear about Martyn’s impressive career as a technologist, which was all sparked off by a summer coding class her mother found in a local Galway newspaper when she was just 12 years old. The passion that was ignited back then is still in evidence today after many years in the industry.
We’re grateful to all our interviewees for taking the time to come into the studio and share their insights and their intelligence for season three of the podcast. And big thanks as ever to our partners IDA Ireland who have made this series possible.
The Leaders’ Room podcast is released fortnightly and can be found by searching for ‘The Leaders’ Room’ wherever you get your podcasts. For those who prefer their audio with visuals, filmed versions of the podcast interviews are all available here on SiliconRepublic.com.
Check out The Leaders’ Room podcast for in-depth insights from some of Ireland’s top leaders. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.
