Stories from female fintech entrepreneurs
To celebrate International Women's Day 2023, we met with two female fintech entrepreneurs to hear about their stories, why they chose to become fintech leaders, their successes and challenges.
Ana Gallacher, founder of BabyReady Finance
Sheila Hogan, CEO and founder of Biscuit Tin
I am Sheila Hogan CEO and Founder of Biscuit Tin a “death-tech” SaaS business - we make life admin easier for you now and easier for those you love in the future by helping you create a digital legacy to be proud of. Biscuit Tin is a digital secure vault holding all your life information that is released to those you nominate when you die, providing them with the direction they need to easily and effectively close down your life and a digital biography of your life to hand down the generations.
I had an entrepreneurial flair from a young age – from making pencil cases that I sold to my school mates, Pencil skirts with my own , clothes label ItFitz and I tried everything to make money … every party plan going. I left School at 16 and went into Tech as I had a feeling it was a thing of the future. I started at Bradford Council as a Junior Computer Officer, I then went to study Computer Studies part-time at Huddersfield Uni.
A Programmer in the early days, I progressed onto analysis project & programme management and up to creating Biscuit Tin I was a Consultant Business Architect designing the way businesses need to operate to leverage technology. Predominantly for large financial services institutions.
The challenges I faced before Biscuit Tin were mainly my own making – always looking for the ‘next thing’ and trying to find my niche and the career I felt destined for. It appeared after closing down the lives of both of my parents armed with a physical Biscuit Tin of old papers. The two worlds of my professional technology career and personal experience collided as I realised that the ‘life close-down’ process is completely broken and needs to change.
It seems many of my challenges since then have revolved around money – from bootstrapping, winning grants and investing what I could from my pension to get the business off the ground. To the challenges of raising capital I face now to forge ahead to scale-up and deliver to our mission to make a difference in this space and be a global Digital Legacy leader within 5 years.
