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Education

StreetSmarts SM

Dads and daughters improving payments

By Dee and Emily Karawadra At a regional event, while introducing Morgan to some
Impact PaySystem industry friends, I was surprised to find many father/
daughter teams working in our industry. One friend,
e've been excited to delve into the topic Steve Duniec, introduced me to his daughter Marcie.
of fathers and daughters working in pay- Steve helped me when I began my career in payments.
ments. We have three daughters. One of Steve entered the industry in February 1991. During the
W them, Morgan, has already joined Impact first five years of his career, he built a large clientele. The
PaySystem. It took some convincing from us before she majority of his business came from referrals from satisfied
agreed to come aboard. customers and referral partnerships.
Morgan has the drive and work ethic to succeed in any In 1996, he signed on with then privately held CardService
industry; however, she started helping in our back-office International to help its agents grow and provide a
when she was 12. She continued to work with us through better experience for merchants. CSI was subsequently
high school and during summer vacations from college. purchased by First Data Corp. At FDC, Steve moved
It made sense for her to join our industry – until we saw through the ranks to manage agent and ISO sales for the
the gender gap in salaries, which gave us pause. In this East Coast, Canada and Puerto Rico. In 2013, he moved
article, Dee endeavors to shed light on this topic. away from heavy travel and corporate life to return to
helping merchants with their payment needs. He has
Dee's thoughts carved out a niche helping ISOs and merchant level
salespeople with difficult to place merchants.
Wnet (a professional organization of women in payments)
recently held its annual leadership summit in Atlanta, Father to father
where the organization spotlighted a report that shines a
light on women in business. A Wnet attendee had tweeted Steve offered hope of cracking the glass ceiling in
a picture of a slide from a presentation with this caption: answering the following questions:
"#Payments industry hires #externally man at 2x the rate
of woman …" 1. Why did you want your daughter to be in this
industry?
The slide shows external hires by gender in payments at I have had a career that has turned out to be
six different levels, along with the average of all other
companies combined. The slide indicates that hiring of beyond my expectations. The paths I chose, and the
earnings have been great. The best part, however,
women in payments scored low at all levels. The largest
gap was at the entry level, where companies in the pay- is the relationships with the many great people in
this industry. When it came time to take my current
ments industry scored eight percentage points lower than
the combined average of all other companies in the study. venture to the next level, my daughter Marci was
working in a less than satisfying position.
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