Sue Laws
Regional EVP, Business Solutions
“Temenos empowered me to do what needed to be done, nobody ever said ‘it’s not your job’. They gave me access to everything I needed.”
Shortly after Sue Laws began her first sales role with Temenos in 2006, the stock market crashed and she went from being part of a pre-sales team of three to sole member.
As a person who likes to find solutions, and naturally curious, she rolled up her sleeves and set about “learning absolutely everything” about the software she hadn’t worked with before.
“I pulled many an overnighter,” she says. “Temenos empowered me to do what needed to be done, nobody ever said ‘it’s not your job.’ They gave me access to everything I needed.”
When the banking industry recovered from the crisis, Sue started building up her team, and now regards this as one of the highlights of her career.
“I’ve been very blessed throughout my career to grow and step up, and it’s been amazing to see people who I brought in come with me,” she says. “They’re now leading teams. I’m like a proud lioness.”
A proactive attitude and willingness to keep learning are key characteristics she looks for when adding people to her team. “If they have the right attitude, you can teach people the skills they need,” Sue says. “Our hours are based around the client, so we need people who are willing to go the extra mile—and we go together, so that we share the stress. We become family to each other.”
Another career highlight was being the lead on the team that worked with PayPal, which became a Temenos customer four years ago.
“It was a really interesting engagement, rubbing shoulders with the PayPal engineers and executives,” she says. “It’s a truly household name global financial institution that everyone knows about.”
Now based in Orlando, Sue first moved from the UK to work for Temenos in the Miami office in 2006, working on project implementation until going into sales two years later. One of her first jobs was an implementation project in Trinidad and Tobago, which she recalls fondly both for the beautiful location and because she met her husband there.
Her background is in banking and she was previously a Temenos client, working for Credit Suisse when the bank appointed the company to do a full transformation. Tasked with choosing a member of staff from her team to oversee the project, she decided to take on the role herself to represent her line of business.
“I always took the jobs nobody wanted because they intrigued me,” she says. “I like to find solutions and take care of things. I don’t like having to do the same thing twice. When there were operational problems or we’d lost money, I’d go in and do root-cause analysis—so rather than pulling people out of the river, I was focused on understanding why so many of them were falling in.”
” I love the idea that this enables me to step in anywhere to help make a difference for the good of the company.”
She is “thrilled, delighted and curious” about being named a Founding Fellow, especially because there are fewer long-serving “Temenosians through and through” based in the US, in comparison with Europe. “I love the idea that this enables me to step in anywhere to help make a difference for the good of the company,” she says.