Give to Gain: Reflecting on Suade's International Women's Day Luncheon

London, UK | 12th March 2026

To mark International Women’s Day 2026, Suade hosted a luncheon at Stationers’ Hall in London, bringing together women from across financial services for a conversation about leadership, visibility and the small acts of support that can alter the course of a career.

The theme was Give to Gain.

It is a phrase that resists grandstanding. Its meaning is practical. Think of the person who puts your name forward when you are not in the room. The colleague who makes an introduction at the right moment. The senior leader who shares enough context to help you understand where you stand, and where you might go next. Careers are often shaped not only by performance, but by access, advocacy and timing.

That felt particularly relevant in a sector where progress has been real, but far from evenly distributed.

Finance and technology have both changed over the past decade. More women are visible in senior roles than before. The language around representation is more established. There is greater scrutiny of who gets backed, promoted and heard. Even so, the upper tiers of leadership remain stubbornly male, especially in technical and specialist areas. In fintech, female founders and executives are still underrepresented. In financial services, the imbalance becomes more pronounced at senior level. In regulatory reporting, where the work is high stakes and often low profile, that gap can feel sharper still.

Suade’s luncheon was not framed as a solution to that problem. It was something more grounded. A chance to bring together women working in and around regulatory reporting, and to create space for a more honest conversation about what progress looks like in practice.

The afternoon featured a fireside chat between Diana Paredes, Suade’s chief executive and co-founder, and Anna Wallace, whose discussion centred on leadership, progression and the role support can play in shaping a career. Drawing on their own experience, the conversation explored what it means to build credibility, how confidence is formed over time, and why visibility still matters in rooms where decisions are made.

What emerged over the course of the afternoon was not a single argument, but a recurring truth: careers rarely advance on merit alone. They are shaped by the people who share knowledge early, offer support without fanfare, and use their influence with some care.

That was where the theme landed most clearly.

There is a tendency, particularly in corporate settings, to treat career support as either formal mentoring or personal luck. In reality, much of it happens in quieter ways. Someone explains the politics of a room before you walk into it. Someone recommends you for a project you did not know was open. Someone offers a piece of context that helps you make sense of a setback. These actions are easy to overlook because they are rarely visible. Yet they can be decisive.

In that sense, Give to Gain was less about generosity as an abstract virtue and more about responsibility. Seniority brings a degree of access. The question is how that access is used.

That matters in any industry. It matters even more in sectors shaped by hierarchy, technical knowledge and established networks. Financial services remains one of them. Regulatory reporting is another. It is demanding work, often done under pressure and with limited public recognition, yet it sits close to the core of how institutions are supervised and understood. The people working in it carry significant responsibility. Their visibility does not always match that weight.

The value of the luncheon lay in its candour. It was not a stage-managed celebration of progress. Nor was it an exercise in corporate self-congratulation. The strongest moments came from the specificity of the conversation: the recognition that support often arrives informally, the admission that confidence can fluctuate even in senior roles, and the shared understanding that visibility still has to be built, not assumed.

There was also a wider point beneath it. Better businesses are built when different perspectives are present early enough to shape decisions. In technology, that is not a matter of optics. It affects the quality of the product. Better questions tend to produce better systems. And better questions are more likely to emerge when teams are not drawn from a single mould.

That belief has been part of Suade’s thinking from the start. The company has long positioned itself at the intersection of regulation, data and technology. Those are fields that depend on rigour, but also on judgement. The discussion at the luncheon was a reminder that judgement is strengthened, not weakened, by diversity of experience.

Events around International Women’s Day can sometimes collapse into familiar language. Progress. Empowerment. Celebration. All of that has its place. But what made this gathering more interesting was its emphasis on something less performative and more useful: the everyday ways people help one another move forward.

That may be the more durable form of change.

Not every act of support is public. Not every intervention will be recognised. Often the most important ones happen before a promotion, before a move, before a person has fully found their footing. They happen in conversations, recommendations and moments of judgement. They are rarely dramatic. Their effect can still be lasting.

That is what Give to Gain captured.

It is also what made the event worth holding.