Lara Tolland is the director of customer delivery for Northteq, a financial technology provider of leasing and lending solutions, and has been with the company for a year, As a leader, Tolland is responsible for delivery excellence, ensuring the Northteq services team provides an outstanding implementation experience and delivers meaningful solutions which meet business needs.

Over the last 14 years, Tolland has been in leadership roles within the fintech lending and leasing space. Prior to Northteq, Tolland led a services team through significant growth that included increasing the team size 400% and doubling revenue year over year for three years. Tolland implemented process and methodology which allowed the team to scale, grow and improve margins by up to 12% each year. Under Tolland’s leadership, her team completed an 18-month, tier one bank project on time and on budget, achieving the main goal of going live before the legacy solution end of life,

Tolland is passionate about delivery and in her first year at Northteq, she has established a project management team and rolled out a new implementation methodology that has reduced implementation times by 35%.

“Lara has an amazing capability to take an abstract, high-level objective and not only translate this to an actionable plan, but also execute against that plan,” Kristian Dolan, CEO of Northteq, says. “She has the leadership to collaborate across multiple functional areas to define the plan. We had an audacious goal this year to enable our customers to execute a deal from quote to signed documents in three minutes on install, Anyone who is familiar with implementing enterprise loan origination software knows this is large goal with many complexities. Lara was able to work with our sales, product and engineering teams to determine what was required from a design standpoint, guided the product team on what her team needed and executed on the goal,”

Tolland is excited about the growth opportunities for Northteq and her current goal is to couple the company’s product solutions with a client and employee experience that outperforms any other vendor in the industry. Tolland is working on revamping Northteq’s client support processes and is looking to leverage the improvements made with projects to enhance the support model and ultimately deliver a higher client satisfaction experience.

Tolland attributes her success to having fantastic mentors early on in her career and putting in extra effort to ask questions and absorb as much as she could from her mentors. She now focuses on paying it forward by coaching and mentoring people early on in their career. Tolland strives to build high performing, high trust teams that are excited about their work, their company and the people they engage with. ^I l recommend younger women in the industry find a mentor, drive your interactions with your mentor and keep pushing to learn from the successes and mistakes they’ve made. On the flip side, don’t be afraid to fail, We learn more from our failures than our successes,” Tolland says.

“I recommend younger women in the industry find a mentor, drive your interactions with your mentor and keep pushing to learn from the successes and mistakes they’ve made. On the flip side, don’t be afraid to fail. We learn more from our failures than our successes.”