I am delighted to congratulate Sarah-Jane (SJ) McColl, Beacon’s Senior VP of Operations, on winning this year’s Excellence in FinTech Award from Markets Media!

Markets Media Group recently announced its 7th Annual Women in Finance Awards, recognizing and celebrating the most talented and accomplished women in the finance industry, across multiple categories. As Markets Media said, “Our methodology for Women in Finance  is simple yet thorough, and keeps the focus on the important opinions: those of the market — i.e. the colleagues, clients and competitors of nominees — rather than ours.”

For the past 4 years, SJ has led project management at Beacon, with a strong focus on clients and how technology can add value to their business. As our company grew, we needed someone to transform this function into a more comprehensive operations department. SJ was appointed as SVP of Operations earlier this year and has embraced her expanded responsibilities to build a more intentional product management function, while supporting Beacon’s core values of diversity and clients first. With a strong background leading engineering teams in FinTech, SJ exemplifies the combination of process design, business understanding, and problem-solving skills that are crucial to make this transformation successful in a high-growth company.

The increasing size and complexity of client projects meant that Beacon needed to scale operations quickly but sustainably. Since the start of 2020, and throughout the pandemic restrictions, SJ has successfully led her team through a 200 percent increase in headcount, and they are still growing. Her emphasis on balancing processes with expediency and making sure that the right people are in the right places are ensuring that Beacon can continue to fulfill client expectations without reducing growth targets. Together with her team, SJ is delivering transformational change in the finance industry—boosting our clients’ innovation, enhancing developer productivity, and supporting their journey to the cloud. 

Please join me in congratulating SJ on a well-deserved award, recognizing her superb focus on execution and delivery of business operations at Beacon Platform and overall contributions to the financial technology industry.