It’s been a while since a former British Lord Chancellor declared “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts”, striking a populist note in the lead up to the UK’s Brexit referendum. In Watching the English, an entertaining book recommended to me when I first immigrated to this country, anthropologist Kate Fox writes about the English having “vestigial traces of a ‘culture of amateurism’, involving an instinctive mistrust of professionalism”. Others have argued about the superiority of generalists in a highly specialised world.1
Recently, the Fnality ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) Community of Practice organised a live Q&A session with Meghan Foreman-Purves, Head of Legal, Europe for CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce). It was a session that all of us at Fnality found insightful and inspiring, so we are delighted to share Meghan's experiences and advice around topics such as leadership, overcoming career obstacles, and parenthood in the workplace with a broader audience in this blog post.
Meghan was, until very recently, a Director of CIBC’s UK regulated subsidiary, and has recently been welcomed to the Fnality Community as CIBC’s Board Observer and Shareholder Representative.
It is Pride month again: the special time of the year when the LGBTQ+ community celebrates who we are. In doing so, we also raise awareness of the discrimination and prejudice that our community struggles against, and of the continuing efforts we can all make – whether LGBTQ+ or allies – to promote equality and inclusion.
Four years ago, my Fnality (formally known as the ‘USC Project’) journey began. I walked into a little office by St Pauls Cathedral that looked like something between the Apple store (read slick and technologically advanced) and a beach hut (read rustic, laid back and the kind of place you wanted to hang out) and contained a handful of geniuses! I took a seat at my new desk and tried to take it all in; new job, new role, new colleagues, new industry, new city. It quickly dawned on me, I’m no longer living in Devon, working in uniform at a major trauma hospital. I’m now working for a super cool technology research and development company in the heart of London, focused on making significant...
Sherif Elkhouly shares how Fnality embraced his uniqueness and created an opportunity for him that broke all moulds!
Is there a better recipe for disaster than changing career, dive headfirst into a new industry, meet a new team only virtually, leave your home and move to a new city - all while in lockdown in the middle of a pandemic?
Who am I?
This must be an important question for anyone who is reading this article, right? I am a Consultant Engineer & have worked with organisations of different scales and domains like E-Commerce, Media and recently FinTechs. As a consultant, we move around between different clients and each time we are reborn with some fond and not so fond memories of our experience. Hence you are reading an article from a five-month-old toddler reborn as a Platform Engineer consultant in Fnality.
