We spoke to Lorna Martyn, head of technology at Fidelity Investments Ireland, about her career journey so far.
Lorna Martyn has had a long career with Fidelity Investments, starting as a common services programme manager in 2004.
Over the subsequent years, Martyn rose up the ranks within the company, and was appointed to head of technology at Fidelity Investments Ireland in May of this year.
“I’ve had quite a number of different opportunities within Fidelity, both here in Ireland and in the US,” she told Siliconrepublic.com at Inspirefest earlier this year.
“Prior to coming to Fidelity, I worked in financial services, in banking, and I also worked in telecommunications as a consultant,” she said. Martyn added that the skills she learned over the years in Fidelity and in her other roles have helped her in her new position.
However, her interest in technology actually began long before her professional life, when her mother signed her up for a coding course at the age of 12.
“I spent a couple of weeks in a classroom learning to write BASIC on a BBC Micro with 12 boys, and I was absolutely hooked after that.”
Martyn said that mentors and coaches have been extremely important to her career development. “I’ve been very fortunate from early stages to have a lot of very strong advocates.”
With the changes and increasing pressures on financial services, technology has become an essential part of the industry.
“The landscape is really, really interesting at the moment,” said Martyn. “If you look around geopolitically across the world, things are changing a lot and it’s a huge change in terms of regulatory landscape.”
Martyn said that Fidelity Investments constantly has to evolve its development methodologies to shorten cycle times, collaborate more and understand its business clients’ problems more, in order to turn around solutions quickly.
She also said her team works a lot with Fidelity Labs, the company’s internal research organisation, to look into emerging technologies.
“We’re very fortunate,” said Martyn. “We’re very representative of the larger Fidelity organisation worldwide, and we’re working in a very, very rich ecosystem.”
