Opinion column: How leadership events empower our community
Our community is ripe with a sense of empowerment. If you are here, don’t plan to stagnate. Here, we grow, and we’re just getting started.
The Sioux Falls Development Foundation, StartUp Sioux Falls, Leadership Sioux Falls, the Sioux Falls Area Community Foundation, Forward Sioux Falls and many other local hubs exist to invest in businesses and community leaders who can helm change and inspire us to feel good about what’s next. These organizations foster inclusion for overlooked minorities in our community so we can all feel equally capable to drive this community forward.
Here, we are forever young. Cough cough goes the contagious gusto in the room.
In our local financial landscape, Brooke Fitts, with First International Bank and Trust, is breaking through and getting noticed (as is often the case with our banking and healthcare leaders in Sioux Falls).
After 20 years in FinTech, Fitts was selected to join the RiseUp Academy, a global leadership cohort of women in finance who will network and build relationships with one another during Money 20/20, a global financial conference in Las Vegas. She will head out there next month to connect with like-minded, emerging female leaders.
RiseUp is a yearlong cohort but an infinite network Fitts can continue to learn from and gauge how her team here is performing compared to others in the global space. With this program, she can be the messenger, bringing to Sioux Falls ideas on how to keep up in banking.
Fitts has worked with many FinTech startups for over the past 20 years—FinTech being a use of technology in banking. She is now head of payment products and strategy for Kotapay, a payments division within FIBT that serves more than 2.5 million employees worldwide. At Money 20/20, she will also help to launch a new platform affording banks to mitigate oversight more accordingly.
A path to growth is never linear, and trailblazers must know this.
Brooke has always pushed the boundaries in the financial industry. She says her career path is “close to her heart” after humble beginnings issuing prepaid cards to underserved communities over 20 years ago. “Every dollar matters,” she says. “This means that our financial health is right there next to the importance of healthcare.”
Because of this awareness both in our community and worldwide, Brooke is unafraid and eager to introduce a tech presence within an industry that was otherwise operating under archaic manual products. If financial wellbeing is paramount to living well, then we need to keep up. She is a pioneer in this mindset.
Like many of our powerhouses in Sioux Falls, Brooke’s work inspires a willingness to grow, a mindset of adaptation that is not scary but liberating. There is no fear to be felt, she urges, only an excitement of what’s to come. Brooke’s work and presence—both in banking and in our community—can make you feel like anything is possible, and that we’re all going to make it. Forge ahead, her quick-paced demeanor says. We have work to do!
“I am someone who thrives on being responsible for innovation and being on the cutting edge of what FinTechs are bringing into the space,” she says. “(The RiseUp program) is an opportunity to connect with people who are creating that kind of real impact.”
If you are going to lead, you must mentor, too. Brooke is not just in the office—or in Las Vegas meeting people for us—she mentors female professionals on behalf of EmBe’s Women’s Leadership Program, she participates in Power Lunches at local middle schools and serves at Call to Freedom, safe housing and counseling for victims of trafficking.
The biggest need she sees? Mentees want a guide to navigate their career landscapes and tools to build their confidence. They want to be like their mentor and participate in our growing community.
“Sioux Falls is an underrated gem when it comes to a community that wants to lift people up,” Fitts says. “I am blessed to be part of a community that wants to elevate one another.”
How do you rise up your fellow community members?
Let’s get out there.
Originally published in the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
