Rosalia Mazza
Founder of The Bright Minded
Rosalia, you’re the founder of The Bright Minded, you also trade crypto on your own, and work with AI tools. How did you first get into fintech, and what shaped your journey along the way?
It started by accident, while I was working at the Italian Embassy in Paraguay. My background is in international politics and finance, not technology. One slow afternoon, I started reading about crypto and everything I found kept circling the same point: how much you could make, how fast. The technology itself barely appeared. I put in a small amount out of curiosity and more or less forgot about it.
More than a year later, I checked the account and found gains. I wanted to know why it had happened. That question turned out to be the one worth asking. The more I followed it, the clearer it became that the rapid gains were the least significant aspect of what I was looking at. The technology was solving real problems that the hype had no interest in explaining.
That's why it eventually became a career. I started writing about crypto, which led to fintech more broadly, then to data, then to artificial intelligence. Each step followed the same instinct: the mechanism always mattered more to me than the result, because a good result is the natural consequence of a good mechanism.
You once shared a story about being asked an inappropriate question about having children during a job interview — something completely unrelated to your professional skills. Have you come across other situations like this, either personally or through stories from other women in the industry? How common do you think these experiences still are today?
Yes, and the examples accumulate fast. Being paid less than men doing the same work. Being excluded from meetings. Women who were more qualified than anyone else in the room but needed a man alongside them just to make their counterparts comfortable enough to sign. Women who founded companies not out of ambition but because employment offered them no real future.
I observed all of this, concluded it was nonsense, and decided to build my career entirely on my own terms. That decision had a price. A lot of men perceived me as difficult. I came to see that label as accurate information about the system rather than about me. Refusing certain conditions and wanting the same professional life a man in my position would have had is not a personality defect. It is a choice to stop making the problem comfortable for the people who benefit from it.
What’s interesting is that despite fintech positioning itself as a forward-thinking industry, many of these trends seem surprisingly familiar. Since you regularly speak with founders and industry leaders, do you feel fintech is really changing for women, or are we still seeing the same patterns in a different form?
Honestly, fintech is no better or worse than any other industry on this. And that is the problem. An industry that builds its entire identity around disrupting old systems should have something different to show by now. It doesn't, not in any meaningful way.
What I consistently observe, speaking with founders and leaders, is a difference in how men and women experience a position of authority. Men tend to experience it as power. Women tend to experience it as responsibility, in every direction: toward their team, toward the press, toward the people their decisions affect. In fintech, which like all finance runs on trust, that instinct is not a weakness. It is exactly what the industry needs. It just hasn't figured out how to value it yet.
That also connects closely to the role of media. As someone working in media and shaping industry conversations, what role do you think journalism plays in making fintech more inclusive? Can the media actually drive change, or does it mostly reflect what’s already happening?
Journalism can absolutely drive change. The media decides what to cover, who to platform, which stories get told and which disappear. That is real power. But it comes with constraints: shrinking attention windows, algorithmic logic that rewards trending signals over important ones, and the pressure to be discoverable before you can be meaningful. Most media never fully escape those constraints.
The ones that do face a different choice. Once you have built a position in the market, you have to decide what to do with it: prioritise commercial interest or genuine editorial standards. Real inclusion in fintech, the kind that shifts something rather than decorating a panel, depends on a small number of media people who reach that position and choose the second option.
You touched on the idea that real inclusion requires more than visibility or symbolic gestures. In your view, what still needs to change in the industry to create real opportunities for women, especially when it comes to leadership and decision-making roles?
What needs to change is our own attitude, and I say that without any illusion that it is a small task. Social change doesn't work by making things easier before they become normal. It works through overexposure, through enough people refusing the same conditions repeatedly until the refusal itself stops being remarkable. That is always uncomfortable, and it always has a cost.
Women who have the skills, the resilience, and some capacity for sacrifice have a responsibility in that process. Not to clear the path for the women coming after them, not to make the professional life they want more accessible just by virtue of being women. But to make it normal. To be present, to hold their position, to refuse to disappear, until the presence of women in these roles stops requiring any explanation at all.
I have never thought women should have everything simply because they are women. I do think the women who can bear the weight of this moment have an obligation to bear it, because that is how the next generation inherits a different normal rather than a slightly more polite version of the same problem.
You also work closely with AI, and right now, there’s a lot of discussion around automation, layoffs, and how roles are changing. Do you think women could be more vulnerable to these shifts, or does AI actually create new opportunities for those entering the industry? How do you see this playing out?
This might sound contrarian, but I think AI will act as a leveller. That was an instinct first. Then I started researching it because I wanted to know whether the data agreed, and it did. What is happening looks like a paradox: AI is not eliminating the need for skilled professionals; it is creating a shortage of them. There will be short-run losses, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But that has been true of every major technological shift in history. We are dramatising it because we are standing in the middle of it.
What I find significant, specifically for women, is what AI makes irrelevant. The criteria that have historically slowed women down have very little to do with skills. They have to do with gender, with networks, with where you come from, with seniority built on time served rather than ability demonstrated. AI doesn't care about any of that. It exposes average performance regardless of who holds it, and it rewards genuine competence regardless of who carries it.
And finally, for women who are building careers in fintech today, or thinking about entering the space now, what advice would you give them based on your own experience in this industry?
On my desktop, I have a quote from R. Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." That is my advice. Stop attributing sexism to a weight it shouldn't have in your life, be brave, let your skills speak, and the new model for women will follow and thrive until it becomes the normal thing.
