Insight: Yaspa’s Kate Marsden on her work and personal goals for 2025
Having croaked through dry January and with the sunlight occasionally peeking through into these dark days, hopefully those more important New Year’s resolutions are still top of mind.
I was forced to consider mine for the excellent Women in Open Banking Virtual Meetup in January, at which I spoke alongside Carrie Forbes, founder and chief executive officer of Rockstar Advisory, and Michelle Beyo, founder and chief executive officer of Finavator.
My goals are big and hairy – as all the best goals are – but in this post-50 life, where time travels at warp speed, that’s what you need.
Language matters
My first ambition is to help drive forward the industry’s work on naming Open Banking payments. I’m a chief marketing officer, and it’s very hard to market something if it hasn’t got a name.
Pay by Bank (with or without hyphens or capitals); account-to-account payments; instant bank payments – we’re all using different terms and different visual language. This is understandable as we refine approaches to optimise conversion for our business customers, but it is of no help in building recognition with the generic payment method to the consumer.
Kate Marsden, chief marketing officer at Yaspa
I have been proud to launch this month the Yaspa Index, looking at consumer awareness of the ‘Pay by Bank’ term, and the intention is that we will run this long enough to track growing awareness and adoption, of both the term that the industry settles on and any associated symbols.
It’s a project close to my heart; I did a degree in linguistics many years ago, and I’m fascinated by the application of language; the broader semantics and the subtle meanings conveyed by those hyphens and capital letters, and it’s a privilege to be able to marry a personal interest with a business need.
And what a need. When I can explain to someone what we do without having to explain it’s a bank-transfer-but-without-the-typing, that thing-that-you-might-have-done-with-HMRC… I don’t think I’m alone in wanting the industry to come together on this.
Jobs for women
My second ambition is more personal: to finish the PhD thesis I have been writing on the side – a project I started before joining Yaspa. This is nothing to do with payments, but it is to do with ambitious women, one in particular, trying to lead a fulfilling life in the second half of the 19th Century.
Options for middle-class unmarried women who needed to work were growing, but still limited: typically teaching or nursing. For those who wanted to travel, missionary work provided an opportunity to explore the world. Some were able to make a living through writing. But it was not easy, and very definitely not equal, and even where women had managed to break the mould, their interesting lives stopped once they married, and were expected to stay at home and raise a family.
In 1897, campaigner Frances E Willard began her book Occupations for Women with a chapter entitled, ‘What is Life For?’, addressing young women who were now aware there were more opportunities opening up to them, but did not know what direction to take.
She wrote: “Select your specialty, then, and cultivate it. The world wants your best and needs it. You can make for yourself a place which shall command the respect and honour of the world, and possibly may shine in the galaxy by whose light centuries take their places in the firmament of history. There is no more practical form of philanthropy than this because every girl who makes herself a high place in the world’s roll of workers leaves a place lower down for some woman who, but for this chance, might be tempted into wrong paths, or to let go her hold on right endeavour. Whoever fits herself for some employment involving good pay and higher social recognition, graduates from the lower grades and leaves them to those who cannot advance, and so helps the world of women in a substantial way.”
Achieving balance in work and life
Now, a few generations on, the positions that we as women can hold in the public and commercial spheres are beyond what most could have then imagined.
But still I look at company websites where all the top team are men, or read stories about the paucity of female founders and VCs. We each have a responsibility to cast aside expectations and live our lives as well and ambitiously as we want, to help inspire those coming after us.
So, I would like to finish this thesis, reintroduce myself to my children who I have ignored for the last few years, and crack on with work.
But I will try to ensure I have other side hustles going, whether it’s more writing, or charitable work; not just because life is short, but because I have found that having another, totally-unrelated interest in my life kept me balanced at work; more grounded and pragmatic, and a better decision maker.
Kate Marsden is chief marketing officer at Yaspa