Amidst the work-from-home environment, Vidya Mani joined Ripple in early 2020 as the Vice President of Engineering for RippleNet. A year into her role, she focuses on improving Ripple’s infrastructure and strengthening her team to further the company’s vision for a more inclusive financial system.
RippleNet is an enterprise solution which helps banks and other financial institutions streamline global payments and reach new customers. RippleNet is consistently evolving to offer customers the fastest, most reliable and secure platform for processing payments.
One of the more momentous changes is the introduction of a cloud offering in 2020, which has recently been SOC 2 Certified. RippleNet Cloud allows financial institutions to increase efficiency and expand product capabilities with a scalable cloud-based solution that helps reduce costs and improve flexibility.
“All of engineering has doubled down on transforming the RippleNet platform. Ripple started out as a peer-to-peer network, but today, we have an excellent cloud offering that better serves our customers’ needs.”
Vidya explains, “Evolving a product that's currently being used and loved by customers — without disruption — requires a lot of attention to detail and deliberate action. The process takes time and effort from everyone, and I’m keeping a pulse on the team to ensure we don't lose energy, momentum or engineer happiness, as we accomplish this task.”
Vidya is confident in her team’s technical acumen and collaboration skills to efficiently progress with these platform changes. Her two core tenets are quality and collaboration, which Vidya believes are required for building good products in a team-focused environment. Having everyone within the company aligned to the same goals ensures that everyone takes responsibility for the quality of the end product.
“Ripple is mission-focused on changing how value moves in the world. The engineering team truly believes in this goal and wants to build the next-generation product. So the energy and grit are there to push through and not just rest on our laurels.”
Keeping a team motivated and engaged while working remotely can be difficult, but onboarding in a leading role while working remotely is even more challenging. However, Vidya credits two main things that have helped her build strong relationships with RippleNet engineers: a great team and Slack.
“If I had to pick one thing that excites me about coming to work everyday, it’s my team. I'm so privileged to have the opportunity to work on a team that is so energized, so engaged and wants to build great things. The warmth they exude is unreal, really. When I joined Ripple last year, this welcoming environment was a theme across the company during my onboarding weeks and months. And then I realized it was not just an onboarding thing, it's just how people are here. Everyone is just genuinely nice and wants to help each other succeed — and I'm very happy to be part of this culture.”
Vidya continues, “I have a hopeless addiction to Slack. It's been a boon for me to get to know the Ripple team as a primary way to communicate. The chat platform really helps me get to joke around and build those bonds without having to be in endless phone calls.”
When looking at the wider picture of the financial and fintech environments, Vidya said that Ripple has the potential to fundamentally change the finance industry and how value moves globally. However, she believes that there is still a lot more work to be done for wider financial inclusion. Ripple Impact and others are doing a lot of great work in the space — but to solve the existing issues with the unbanked and underbanked, financial inclusion needs to be adopted more into the mainstream sector.
“Financial inclusion is always on my mind. Even though a lot of progress is already being made in the industry, the unbanked and underbanked still remain largely out of the picture. There is some good work being done in pockets, but I hope that these efforts become more mainstream and I want to be a part of that movement. Our mission of creating an Internet of Value has the potential to make this widespread.”
If you’re interested in helping create a financially inclusive world, we’re hiring.
