Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself. Andrew Helms is CEO, USA at fintech company SumUp. How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? Every single one of us goes shopping at least on a weekly basis. Whether you are buying groceries, clothes, coffee, or the latest video game, you are interacting with local merchants, stores, and the community around them. Ultimately, my job is to provide the tools to help merchants build their business—products like payments systems, POS, kiosk, loyalty, invoicing, bookings, and handhelds. We focus on the complicated tools, thus freeing merchants up to focus on running their business successfully and connecting with their customers. One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? Being successful in such an incredibly fast moving field like fintech requires bringing together people with an incredibly diverse set of perspectives, backgrounds, and life experiences. Oftentimes, the best ideas come from those who don’t have a more classical “business” background. Like many of my colleagues, I took a long roundabout way to fintech, spending time in the Middle East as an aspiring journalist, helping grow a meal kit company out of Chicago, and eventually jumping into fintech with a wide variety of experiences and perspectives that brings our business forward. I could spend all day telling you stories about the backgrounds of our people who come from around the world and bring a passion and fresh set of eyes to helping merchants build a thriving business. What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? It’s more of an ongoing practice at this point, but every week, I’ll send a Slack message to our entire US team titled “Here are the seven things you need to know this week.” Keep reading here.—EC | 
