Hello, FinTech community. Welcome to our FinTech Top Voice Interview Series.
The latest FinTech Interview with Holly Briedis, SVP, Global Industry GTM at ServiceNow is an interactive Q&A-styled conversation.
Holly Briedis brings 18 years of expertise across 3 main dimensions of business:
1) Leveraging technology to solve customer problems
2) Driving incisive, customer-centered growth at organizations of all sizes and scale 3) Building world-class teams with a ‘roll up your sleeves’ mentality
She is currently the Senior Vice President, Global Industries, at ServiceNow, one of the highest-growth enterprise software platforms in the world. In her newly established role, Holly is responsible for all growth across ServiceNow’s major industries, including: Financial Services, Telco & Media, Technology, Manufacturing, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Retail & Consumer Goods. In doing so, her mandate is to make ServiceNow more customer-centric in how we go-to-market in service to both current and prospective customers.
Prior to joining ServiceNow, she was President and EVP, Chief Customer & Marketing Officer at Fossil Group, the global leader in accessories manufacturing, marketing and distribution. Prior to that, Holly was a Partner at McKinsey & Company, where she advised some of the world’s most recognizable consumer and retail brands, and led one of the highest growth practices within the firm, the North American Customer Experience & Digital practice. Before joining McKinsey, she was a venture capital investor and early stage operator in digital tech & payments in the US and East Africa.
Holly is a Board member of KIPP, the largest non-profit education network in the United States; Shoptalk, the leading forum for retail changemakers; and, she advises a handful of leading retail technology VC firms and entrepreneurs, including RevTech (VC), Accel Partners (VC), Jane Technologies (Series C) and Sechey (Series A).
She holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Finance and Marketing, and a BA/BS from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she graduated summa cum laude and as a Board of Regents Scholar. Holly is an avid golfer, sommelier, and emerging market travel enthusiast. She resides in Southlake, Texas with her husband, son and daughter.
About ServiceNow –
ServiceNow makes the world work better for everyone. Our cloud-based platform and solutions help digitize and unify organizations so that they can find smarter, faster, better ways to make work flow. So employees and customers can be more connected, more innovative, and more agile. And we can all create the future we imagine. The world works with ServiceNow.
Let’s start…
FinTech Insights (FTI): Hi Holly, Welcome to the Fintech Top Voice interview series. Please tell us a little bit about your journey in the tech industry and how you arrived at ServiceNow.
Holly: My sights were not initially set on enterprise software. In fact, when I joined ServiceNow, I was told that my greatest asset—and my biggest challenge—would be that I didn’t come from this industry. That fresh perspective has shaped how I approach my role, leading our global industries business to build solutions that meet and solve our customers toughest challenges.
My career has always been rooted in customer-centric transformation. Before joining ServiceNow, I was Chief Customer and Technology Officer for a $2 billion retail company. Before that, I spent over a decade at McKinsey, leading the retail and customer experience practice, and serving B2C businesses. At every stage, my focus has been on how brands can engage with customers in ways that are authentic, relevant, and built for long-term growth.
What drew me to ServiceNow was its evolution. The investment in the core platform has established an incredibly solid foundation, heightened by the advent of Agentic AI. Now, the next frontier is creating vertical solutions that are deeply tailored to a given industry’s needs or challenges. For example, while IT ticket management can be a process replicated across industries, the customer care experience in regulated industries like insurance or finance is incredibly nuanced. My role is about helping ServiceNow meet customers’ industry-specific needs in a way that drives real impact and tangible value.
FTI: How is the latest ServiceNow-DXC partnership slated to transform the Insurance Tech industry? Could you highlight the key capabilities you are introducing to the industry?
Holly: Insurance—especially life insurance—has been waiting for its digital transformation moment. Unlike other parts of the financial services industry, such as fintech or banking, where this transformation has been underway, insurers are still burdened with decades of technical debt and ingrained manual processes. That makes innovation difficult to achieve.
The partnership between ServiceNow and DXC is designed to change that. Together, we’re bringing AI, automation, and intelligent workflows to modernize core insurance operations. This means policyholders can now navigate their coverage through AI-powered self-service portals that make interactions seamless and intuitive. Claims processing is faster, more automated, and less reliant on manual approvals. Customer service agents now have real-time access to past interactions and policy details before a call even begins, ensuring policyholders don’t have to repeat information or be forced to navigate a maze of disconnected systems.
This isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about making insurers more agile, customer-focused, and ready for the future.
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FTI: How is handling the GTM function for Fintech partners different from those in the traditional IT and networking businesses? What kind of challenges do you face in these domains?
Holly: Fintech is fascinating because it straddles two industries financial services and technology. Some fintech’s see themselves as finance-first, others as tech-first. That means they face unique go-to-market challenges on the B2B2C spectrum—balancing regulatory requirements with the need for massive processing power to initiate and facilitate customer transactions instantaneously and at scale. ServiceNow’s approach in fintech reflects this duality, bringing deep expertise from both financial services and technology to help our customers navigate these complexities.
The biggest challenge in these industries is ensuring we’re not just providing technology, but truly embedding ourselves in how these companies operate. That’s why we bring in industry leaders who’ve spent decades navigating these complexities as operators to the table to help our customers directly.
FTI: What does your GTM playbook for the fintech and healthcare industry look like?
Holly: ServiceNow’s go-to-market strategy is built on deep industry expertise, customer-first alignment, and technology-driven transformation. We have the privilege of starting with the best platform and some of the best industry applications, as a go-to-market team. Our role is then about infusing experts in these critical industries, ensuring we understand both the operational and strategic challenges our customers face. This customer-centric approach is ingrained throughout our GTM strategy—ensuring everyone, from our field leadership to partners to marketing to account leads, are well-equipped with this knowledge.
It’s also critical that our teams understand where customers are at in their digital transformation journeys, as it can vary drastically across industries. Our GTM playbook for a fintech will look different from a traditional insurance provider, who is contending with decades of legacy systems but still has a desire to innovate for its customers. At ServiceNow, we bring together an intimate understanding of our customer’s goals, challenges, architecture, and perspective for how data, workflows and AI can transform work, in how we go to market.
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FTI: How does the AI-driven, self-service portal improve the overall policyholder experience and what specific features contribute to faster, more accurate responses?
Holly: Insurance isn’t something people typically interact with daily, so when they do, the experience must be seamless and intuitive. AI-driven self-service portals are changing the game by predicting customer needs before they even ask. AI anticipates why a policyholder is reaching out and surfaces relevant information in real-time, eliminating frustrating back-and-forths with providers.
Context-aware assistance ensures that whether a policyholder is using a chatbot, making a call, or speaking with a live agent, they aren’t repeating information or starting from scratch. AI also plays a role in next-best-action recommendations, including more sophisticated use cases like surfacing a more suitable policy or resolving claims faster.
The impact is undeniable: faster issue resolution, fewer customer frustrations, and an overall better experience.
FTI: With the introduction of AI-driven automation in policy administration, what impact do you anticipate on back-office operations, and how will this contribute to overall business innovation?
Holly: Back-office insurance operations have barely changed in decades, and that’s exactly why they’re ripe for disruption. AI-driven automation is eliminating inefficiencies in underwriting, claims processing, and compliance.
Routine policy administration tasks that once took days now happen in real time. Lowering manual workloads is also significantly reducing costs while improving scalability. Insurers can now handle a growing customer base without adding unnecessary operational complexity.
But this isn’t just about automation—it’s about transformation. AI is moving insurance companies from slow, manual processes to a dynamic, data-driven model that supports real-time decision-making and better customer outcomes.
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FTI: Would you like to share your Women’s Day message to young and budding marketers and GTM professionals who are at the crux of starting a career in B2B SaaS domains?
Holly: Don’t over-plan your career. I see so many women trying to map out every step, worried that if they take the wrong job or role, they’ll be off track. The reality is some of the best opportunities come from saying yes to things you didn’t expect.
Instead of fixating on what you believe is the “right path,” ask yourself: What will I learn from this? Will this role expand my skill set and challenge me? Will I build relationships with people who could ultimately support me?
Careers aren’t linear. They’re built through experiences and relationships, and sometimes that means taking small risks. The more colors you add to your professional “crayon box,” the more options you’ll have in the long run. Take risks and be open to new challenges.
FTI: Tag a senior executive in the industry whose GTM voice you would like to recommend to our Fintech audience:
Holly: I love getting to connect and work with my friend and peer at Google, Carrie Tharp. She oversees a lot of exciting industry innovation across financial services and technology (alongside other verticals) and is a great person to count on to break the status quo.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights on Fintech with us, Holly! We look forward to having you again at Fintech Top Voice series.
