Kelly Kay - EVP, CFO, and Chief of Diversity and Inclusion, TRI

Kelly Kay is the Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI). In her current role she is responsible for overall business operations, technology delivery and continuing to build a more diverse and inclusive environment at TRI. Kelly joined TRI in February 2017 and formerly served as the Chief Operating Officer. 

Prior to TRI, Kelly served as the Vice President of Business Operations at Lyft, Inc., where she built and led the teams responsible for Regulatory Compliance, Audit & Reporting, Payments & Fraud, and Airport Operations. She also served as the Chief Operating Officer and President of YapStone, Inc., a leading electronic payments company in the real estate property space. 

Before serving as an operational leader, Kelly was an attorney for more than 19 years and held roles as a General Counsel, Associate General Counsel & Head of Compliance, as well as a leader in public policy and government relations at companies such as MasterCard, eBay, PayPal and J.P. Morgan (previously Banc One). Kelly has spent her career designing solutions to bring traditional, highly regulated products and services into the digital age in a compliant and operationally friendly manner. Her key areas of focus include ride-sharing, autonomous technologies regulation, online payments, online financial services, privacy, anti-money laundering, and online auctions. 

Kelly is an internal Board member of Toyota AI Ventures, Toyota’s corporate venture capital group. with over $200M under management. She attended The Ohio State University and Capital University Law School where she graduated Summa Cum Laude.

In this episode of Fairygodboss Radio, Kelly Kay talks about her career journey and why you should never say no to opportunity. 

[Recorded on August 31, 2020]