THE JUNGLE GYM
Trisha Price is Chief Product Officer for nCino, the worldwide leader in cloud banking that empowers financial institutions with scalable technology to help them achieve revenue growth, greater efficiency, cost savings, and regulatory compliance. In the summer of 2020, nCino successfully IPO’d in the middle of one of the most uncertain moments in recent American history and had the biggest one-day pop of any U.S. tech IPO in nearly 20 years. As CPO, Price knows she’s in charge of selling a vision of her product, and that’s often been how she thought of her leadership roles in financial tech.
Fresh out of college, Price missed no beats and began developing software for financial software institutions. Early on, she found herself writing net investing income forecasting models for John Hancock, the massively influential Boston-based insurance and finance giant.
When Price started her career, she told us, there wasn’t as much distinction between product management and developers as there is today. Price knew she had a foundational knack for solving financial problems with technology, and all her roles tended to center around that skill set.
Always leading with her math major and her tech instincts, she was a developer for years, as well as a product manager at Fannie Mae, helping that company rebuild systems when that company was in the middle of its restatement. The net result of Price’s experience, regardless of title, means that she is a true jack of all trades in the financial sector.
At every new job and with every rescaling, she took every opportunity to learn something new, making sure to learn everything she could about the unique “secret sauce and superpowers” of each of her mentors along the way.
“Your career is a jungle gym,” she says. “And you have to constantly be stretching, building new muscle, learning something new to be the best.”
This is good advice for anybody’s career, but it’s worth adding that female leadership in the financial sector is still a relatively rare achievement and one that Price has managed multiple times.
Never afraid to take risks, Price left stable Fannie Mae for financial startup Primatics in 2009. She found herself drawn to the company and the challenge, even as the sole breadwinner for a baby and a two-year-old (Price’s husband stayed home to raise the kids during this part of her journey.)
“If you do something, and it doesn’t work out, go do something else,” Price says, explaining her lack of apprehension and tendency to jump at new opportunities, adding that she makes a point of always living within her means. That financial buffer allows for change to happen when needed.
ENTER nCINO
Five years after Price joined the company, Primatics was in the process of a strategic sale, and she found herself pondering a potential GM role at some new iteration of that company while also wondering what else might be out there. That’s when a mutual customer happened to rave to her about nCino.
“Nobody raves about the culture at a financial tech corporation,” she jokes. “I knew I had to meet these people.”
Price says she was drawn by the leadership at nCino (“good people, incredibly talented”) and the fact that the company was “onto something” with a product that was solving a very tangible financial problem. The fact that the company’s main hub is located on the beach in idyllic Wilmington, N.C. did not hurt.
“Man, this is gonna be fun,” Price thought, having no idea she would be with the company as they pulled off a successful IPO during the massively destabilizing COVID pandemic.
“When you focus on the right things, like finding the right company with the right atmosphere. the other things come,” she says.
CULTURE
With a current 1,100 employees serving customers in 12 countries, Price upholds that maintaining the company’s notably energetic culture is “pretty simple.”
“Culture isn’t a program. It’s not about the snacks in the kitchen,” she says, before assuring us that said on-hand snacks could keep one happily fed for a month. The culture has to flow, she says, from somewhere more fundamental.
“The energy and the focus here is organic. It’s just how we started the company from the beginning. It’s who we are,” Price says. “It’s the way the leadership brings themselves to the office every day. It’s how you deal with problems, right? What do you do? Do you blame somebody internally, or do you rally around together as a team, and fix it? You take care of your people.”
“It’s how you treat your people on good days and bad days,” she adds. “You show up and you really help each other.”
CELEBRATING WINS
Executing day in and day out on the same vision nCino has had since the start is a huge part of the culture at the company. But it’s also about celebrating the wins along the way, which should be on anyone’s mind when they recall that this company is indeed located on the beach.
“For the 100th employee at the company, we had a BBQ in the parking lot. All the families came,’ she says. “Now we have a big beach volleyball party twice a year for product launches. You do have to keep up that energy to keep people excited. We have a saying: We take our product seriously but not ourselves.”
PANDEMIC REACTIONS
This vibrant nCino culture has continued during the COVID crisis, during which time the company has redoubled its efforts to care for its employees with childcare and home office stipends, schedule flexibility, and a sort of generalized kindness. In fact, nCino managed to keep their office open and safe during most of 2020 with minimal staff, offering employees a quiet space to come and work during the pandemic if they needed somewhere to focus.
Despite the slower innovation and collaboration during the pandemic due to remote work, Price says “there hasn’t been a blip in terms of velocity or quality of work.”
New product releases have kept the employees busy, with nCino staff especially rallying around solving deep problems banks faced in 2020. With the onslaught of personal and small business loan requests that came in the wake of the pandemic hitting the economy, nCino’s tech was key in speeding up the overall process during the crisis.
“These institutions saw more loan applications in an hour than they saw in a year,” Price says of the crisis the industry faced, and the problem that nCino helped solve.
BIG CHALLENGES
“Our mission from day one has been to transform financial services through innovation, reputation, and speed. And we take that seriously,” Price says. “And speed comes down to two things. One is the speed that gets new products to market, and the other more important one is how we help our customers improve their own speed and efficiency.”
With offices in seven countries and customers in 12 countries, the potential for growth and impact at nCino is enormous, although Price still encourages new employees to consider relocating to the Wilmington office. The chemistry that comes from the in-person collaboration is of central importance to the development of these kinds of products, she says, and the allure of small-town Wilmington is tough to resist.
With the war for tech talent in full swing, Price says attitude and aptitude come first – as well as true diversity of people and of thought – when it comes to the kind of candidates the company looks for.
“Are you going to bring your whole self to work?” she asks of candidates who may be drawn to nCino, as she herself was five years ago. “Are you going to produce a work product you’re proud of? Are you going to be kind? Are you a culture add, and not just a culture fit?”
“People want to work here, and they want to make the company successful,” Trisha Price says of nCino. “And we’ve only scratched the surface of the solutions we can put out there as continue to innovate and expand across the globe.”
