Julia Streets
Financial services firms are expected to adopt new technology faster than their regulators, risk teams or cultures are built to absorb. Innovation programmes stall not on the technology itself but on the gap between what executives announce in public and what their organisations are actually able to execute. Closing that gap requires someone who has lived inside both the trading floor and the startup, and can speak credibly to each.
Julia Streets MBE is a fintech entrepreneur, broadcaster and conference host who helps financial services and technology firms communicate, position and grow through periods of regulatory and technological change.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Julia Streets
- Twenty-five years inside financial services, from senior roles at NYSE Euronext and Instinet to founding Streets Consulting, gives her unusual fluency across the language of trading floors, regulators, fintechs and boards.
- DiverCity Podcast, which she launched in 2017 as the first DE&I podcast in financial services, has run 16 seasons with listeners in more than 50 countries and gives her a documented track record of holding industry leaders to specific commitments, not slogans.
- An MBE in the 2025 King’s Birthday Honours, awarded for services to diversity and inclusion in entrepreneurship in financial services and technology, is a credential almost no other speaker in her topic area carries.
- Her host and moderator craft, sharpened by years on the stand-up circuit, makes her a credible choice for conferences where the chair has to keep senior bankers, regulators and founders in the same conversation without flattening any of them.
- She advises fintech founders and global institutions on the same set of growth and communication problems, which means she can speak to both sides of the buyer-vendor relationship in the room.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Streets Consulting, advising fintech startups, scaleups and global financial institutions on growth, marketing and communications.
- MBE, 2025 King’s Birthday Honours, for services to diversity and inclusion in entrepreneurship in financial services and technology.
- Host and executive producer of DiverCity Podcast, the first DE&I podcast in financial services, with 16 seasons and listeners across 50 countries.
- Author of The Lingua Franca of the Corporate Banker, published by Searching Finance.
- Former senior executive at NYSE Euronext (global head of communications, technology division) and Instinet (European marketing and sales development).
- Twice named a Global Diversity Champion in the Global Diversity List; three-time Brummell Magazine listee for women on boards, women entrepreneurs and women of influence in the City.
- Trustee of Street Child; regular broadcast contributor on BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Kent and City AM.
Biography
The first DE&I podcast in financial services launched in 2017 with no obvious commercial reason to exist. Sixteen seasons later, DiverCity Podcast has listeners in more than fifty countries and a back catalogue of named industry figures committing on the record to specific changes. The host and executive producer is Julia Streets, and the show is one piece of a wider body of work on how financial services actually changes, rather than how it announces it does.
Streets Consulting, which she founded after senior roles at NYSE Euronext and Instinet, advises fintechs and global institutions on growth, positioning and communications. The brief is the same on both sides: how does a firm explain what it does to people who are paid to be sceptical of it. Two decades inside trading-floor culture, and a 2012 satirical book on corporate jargon, The Lingua Franca of the Corporate Banker, give her a low tolerance for the kind of language that lets executives avoid saying anything specific.
The 2025 MBE, awarded in the King’s Birthday Honours for services to diversity and inclusion in entrepreneurship in financial services and technology, sits alongside two listings as a Global Diversity Champion and three appearances on Brummell Magazine’s lists of women on boards, women entrepreneurs and women of influence in the City. The recognitions track a single argument across her work: that diversity in finance is a commercial question, not a compliance one, and that it should be measured by who gets hired, promoted and listened to.
For an audience, the practical effect is a speaker and host who can move between fintech innovation, capital markets technology and DE&I without losing the room, because she has actually built a business in each. She is also a former stand-up comedian, which is why bankers tend to talk back to her on stage rather than at her.
Key speaking topics
- Fintech innovation and capital markets technology
- Diversity, equity and inclusion in financial services
- Entrepreneurship in regulated industries
- Communication and influence for senior leaders
- AI and the future of financial services
- Conference chairing and panel moderation
- Women in fintech and technology
Ideal for
- Boards and executive teams in banking, capital markets and fintech navigating technology adoption and regulatory change.
- CHROs and DE&I leads in financial services who need a credible external voice on inclusion that holds up to commercial scrutiny.
- Founders and investors at fintech scaleups working on positioning, growth and institutional credibility.
- Conference organisers in financial services who need a chair or moderator with subject fluency across innovation, regulation and culture.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of where fintech innovation is genuinely changing financial services and where it is being oversold.
- Specific, named examples of how DE&I commitments translate into hiring, promotion and product decisions, drawn from sixteen seasons of recorded interviews.
- Direct, jargon-stripped language for talking about technology change inside regulated organisations.
- A working sense of how fintech founders and incumbents see each other, useful for anyone building or buying across that line.