This passionate, hard-working, start-up maven is currently responsible for driving growth for Virtusa’s Banking and Financial Services segment, which accounts for more than 50% of the company’s business. Filippa Noghani is a strong believer that hard work pays off, and she has proven that to be true. Currently serving as the Senior Director and Head of Americas Banking and Financial Services Marketing at Virtusa, she also recently joined the NYC FinTech Women’s board aiming to promote and empower women in FinTech.
“It’s important to never compromise your morals and values, and I will be the first to stand up for the underdog.”
Name: Filippa Noghani
Current Role: Sr. Director of Marketing / Head of Americas Marketing for Banking and Financial Services and Strategic Accounts
Company: Virtusa
Filippa has worked for a series of FinTech startups, both in lending and payments, where she has been tasked to build marketing departments from the ground up. She has done everything from creating company vision and mission statements, creating a brand, building websites, running PR initiatives, to launching and taking new products to the market.
“I started my career working for one of the top 10 freight forwarders in the world called Nippon Express. Within 2 years I was leading our marketing efforts in the Americas.”
“I am very passionate about what I do and love what I do for a living. I do often identify myself with my job, because I spend the majority of my time working, and my career has always been a priority in my life.
Raised in Sweden by Persian parents, she is trilingual in Swedish, English, and Farsi and identifies herself as Swedish more than anything else, but calls New York City home.
"I love everything that NYC stands for and admire the people - you will find the most hard working people, and the dreamers who have their minds set to reach their goals".
She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two year old son. She recently joined the NYC FinTech Women board, serving as Marketing Chair. She leads a team of 7+ volunteers, with the goal to elevate the brand and continue to drive the mission to connect, empower and promote women in FinTech.
Filippa's Diary:
Monday
8:00 am: I have no calls this morning which is a miracle. We usually have most of our calls in the morning since the majority of the team is based out of India. We recently started to send our son back to daycare and today is my turn to drop him off. It’s usually a nightmare, he has a meltdown every time we drop him off. They usually check his temperature and ours at the door, and are super careful to not let anyone except employees on the premises, so it makes us feel OK, at least, considering we are in the middle of a pandemic still.
10:50 am: I look up and realize I haven’t even had coffee yet - I have been trying to go through a webinar deck and create a script for a dry-run at 11am, I will be moderating the webinar.
1:30 pm: There has been a lot of back to back calls, time to eat an açaí bowl while someone else speaks in this call. For better or worse, we don’t use video.
2:00 pm: My brain is fried from multi tasking all day- I do a quick 20 min yoga session, hear my entire body crack and take a shower.
3:00 pm: My company is sponsoring a NYC FinTech event next year, so I reach out to our sponsorship and events team to get the latest on the event. Before I was offered the role to join NYCFW as Marketing Chair, I had reached out to Sasha (co-founder at NYCFW), after meeting her at an event years ago, to see if we could sponsor a live event. I had envisioned a panel with some of the most inspiring women in FinTech who also happen to be some of our largest clients, but that’s just a dream for now. We are trying to do something digitally for the time being.
4:30 pm: Jumping on one last call with my marketing counterparts who lead the other business units, and our boss, to square out some initiatives we are driving across all of the verticals. We are as frank with each other as you can possibly be. We are all at capacity and stressed so we try to laugh it off before we end the call.
5:30 pm: My husband picks up our son from daycare, while I prepare dinner. I have messages pinging me across Teams and Slack - but I am trying to spend this one hour with my son, so I have to put away my phone. My husband doesn’t have his usual evening call today, so we get to eat an early dinner at 6pm, all together.
7:00 pm: My husband puts our son to bed, since I have lots of work left to do. I realize the campaign email that I meant to send since 11am is still in draft. I hop on a call with my co-workers, we have a sanity check, while we try to figure out what we want to give each other as holiday gifts. They are truly amazing, and I feel extremely lucky to be working with them. We rarely work on the same things, since we each head marketing for different segments and have different business plans, but we are there for each other.
9:00 pm: I close my work laptop and hop on a NYCFW call with Michelle (our co-founder) and Lindsay (our FFF lead). We are discussing a revamp of our FinTech Female Friday’s for 2021. I’ve managed to sell them on the idea, so we discuss upcoming features, some cool social media ideas and potential new branding.
9:30 pm: I hop on a call with Erin, the latest member on our marketing team at NYCFW. She has been fantastic with just picking up the ball and running with it since things have been very hectic, and I wasn’t able to give much guidance. We get some alignment on new processes we want to create and discuss brand messaging and social media timeline for an upcoming event in January.
Tuesday
6:30 am: Our son wakes up and it’s a lot of mamma, mamma until I get on my first call at 8.30 am - my husband drops him off today.
2:00 pm: We have our weekly meeting with the team who leads our strategic accounts to discuss a campaign we released this morning. The majority of the campaigns for existing accounts go through our client partners, which makes reach and impact very hard to measure, so we are looking for alternative ways. We are discussing some other ideas; I am trying to bring in the always-on-marketing mode but it’s very challenging since we haven’t historically created strategic long term go-to-market plans. I’m planning to make it a first!
3:00 pm : The entire day has been a blur, a lot of calls.
5:00 pm: It’s supposed to be a snowstorm tomorrow so I drive to Trader Joe’s and freeze in the 35-minute line since our fridge is empty...
6:30 pm: I hop on a quick call with one of my business unit heads to discuss planning.
7:00 pm: I’m exhausted!
8:00 pm: I get on a call with Sasha and Melissa (NYCFW) to discuss an upcoming event that my company is sponsoring.
8:30 pm: Time to take a mental break from the screen - I am going to make apple crumb pie with the Marsan Vanilla Sauce that my mom just shipped from Sweden. We couldn’t fly home to Sweden this year because of Covid, so she mailed us a big care package from Sweden.
Wednesday
9:30 am: We have a call about a diversity and inclusion program with one of our strategic accounts. I am beyond excited about this program, and can’t wait to support it. I could be doing this kind of work all day every day.
12:00 pm: Showtime - we are running a webinar with one of our partners for one of our accounts. I am moderating, and this is the time my accent comes out. There are certain times and with certain people my accent pops out, this is one of them!
3pm: Finally done with the back to back calls. We get a call from my son's daycare - he is not 100%, so my husband runs over to pick him up.
4:30 pm: We have a telemedicine conference call with my son's Pediatrician.
6:30 pm: It’s NYC Fintech Women’s Holiday Party. The team sent us a package of goodies, and ingredients to make our own cocktails. We use a platform called Kumo, and it reminds me of how a real life party is like, because depending on where you “stand” in the room, you will hear different conversations. It reminds me of a real life event, where you sometimes stand between several people and hear 2-3 conversations at the same time.
8:30 pm: Radhika and the marketing team closes out the bar in this virtual event. Classic! I actually had so much fun that I forgot about all the stress and exhaustion I have been feeling lately.
Thursday
6:00 am: Lucas slept through the night, so we are at ease, it’s not an ear infection. It also looks like winter wonderland outside.
8:00 am: My husband and I plan our day and split up our time with our son, since schools and daycares are closed because of the storm. We worked with no childcare for the majority part of the pandemic, so we know the drill, but we don’t love it. It means lots of TV when we are both on calls, and we work all night. With our current workload, we work already day and night while we have childcare.
1:00 pm: Finally out of calls. I have blocked off my calendar to get a chance to start planning for next year and next quarter, I have a very unrealistic timeline, and I'm swamped with executing campaigns. The entire team is slim, so nobody gets much breathing room. Like my colleague says: “we are in this together”… we really are.
3:30 pm: I set up a quick call with one of my Business Unit heads and Chief Architect to get alignment on what we need to do for next week in terms of planning.
4:00 pm: We have our marketing teams holiday party - we do a white elephant party over teams. We rarely do video calls, so it’s nice to see everyone.
5:30 pm: I am missing an event we are hosting with NYCFW tonight, would love to see the experience but I can’t be everywhere!
6:30 pm: My husband puts our son to bed, and I am back working. It is really hard to be creative and get your thoughts down when you are executing all day long.
12:00 am: I finish up working, and chat quickly with my co-worker to pick his brain and see if I have not missed anything. We agree I need an army for my plan. He needs some help with initiatives he is driving, and I have a friend (who also happens to be my old boss) who is a pro in that, so I connect them with each other.
Friday:
8:00 am: Already on the first call of the day - we are back to back until noon.
12:00 pm: I am feeling terrible, definitely coming down with a cold.
1:00 pm: I realize I haven’t renewed my driver's license - I don’t even know who I am - missing important things like that is not my m.o.
6:00 pm: Texting with Lindsay about some of our NYCFW social posts.
7:00 pm: In bed with chills - I pass out.
Saturday
5:00 am: I wake up and realize my husband is in our son's bed, we swap so he gets some sleep.
6:00 am: Putting on Coco for my son, while I renew my drivers’ license, catching up on emails, making payments, taking a look at my investment portfolio. I love having all my IRA’s and investments with Charles Schwab, their customer service is awesome (and 24/7), no fee, and the app is so easy. I used Motif to invest, but they recently shut down, and I decided to close the account. I’ve been wanting to start one with Ellevest because I absolutely love everything about them, but I found it not as straightforward to pick my investments as I wanted it to be.
8:00 am: This is the highlight of my week - Coffee and New York Times. I always start with the Real Estate section, then Metropolitan and Business. I never read the news section.
9:00 am: We go for a walk to Prospect Park for sledding, our son wasn’t a fan, so we headed back home.
12:00 pm: I am taking the next 2 weeks off, since I have been feeling very burnt out. I have reached that level in my career where I know when I need to take a break, in order to come back up with a fresh take. But when you are one person, with no backup, it usually means you need to catch those days across the rest of the week/months. I end up working the entire day. I have campaigns that need to be released to the sales team, a couple of initiatives that need to be initiated, and I promised to share our Q4 calendar (our fiscal year ends in March) and our strategy for next year with one of my business unit heads. I also set up a call for Monday morning so we can review the plan, although I am on PTO. One last meeting for 2020, and then I will need to shut off emails for the year.
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