We're delighted to share that the 5th episode of Women Leading the Way podcast is out! This one features Nadia Edwards-Dashti, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Harrington Starr — the financial services and fintech recruitment firm she helped build from the ground up.

Nadia's path into the industry wasn't planned. She studied history, then international relations, at UCL, hoping to land in the foreign office instead of the city. A recruiter had other plans. They pulled her into an interview with ten minutes' warning and no real explanation of what the job even was. Despite not understanding the industry, she decided to stay in it, and started noticing that not everyone was getting advocated for fairly.

That observation followed her into 2010, when she co-founded Harrington Starr on trust and relationships rather than speed and quick placements.

Who even gets considered in the first place is the heart of this episode. CV-led screening and interviews built to trip candidates up rather than set them up to succeed get little patience from Nadia. Nor does the claim that diverse talent "just isn't out there" — women make up 40% of financial services and 28% of fintech, numbers that don't square with talent shortage.

It's a case she's built over more than 600 episodes of FinTech's DEI Discussions and in her book, Fintech Women Walk the Talk, drawn from the podcast's first 100 conversations. They’re all anchored to the same question she keeps asking guests: what does inclusion actually mean to you?

Nadia also joins host Maria Tunikova to talk through how AI transforms fintech hiring. Her core argument is that automation still can't check its own work — an experienced person is. And the industry's current appetite for lean teams, where several roles get folded into one and junior positions go first, is depleting the very pipeline it will need to promote from in a few years.

"It really is what you want to see and what you allow yourself to see." — Nadia Edwards-Dashti.

Listen to the full conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.