Elizabeth Hoemeke has been CIO at One Inc, an insurtech payments platform, since 2021. She is moving on. Her next role is not yet set, but the direction is clear: she wants to take what she has built in financial services and apply it somewhere that has not caught up yet.
Twenty-two years across Equifax, First Data, Elavon, and U.S. Bank built a particular capability -- the ability to take something technically complex and make it resonate for the person across the table. That capability became a core strength during her CIO tenure. The ability to synthesize complex problems, solutions or ideas and succinctly present what is most important to the audience is essential for a technology leader.
"They don't want to know how to make the watch," she said. "They just want to know what time it is."
What Changes When the Vision Is Yours
When Hoemeke moved into the CIO role, what made her most nervous was the technology. She had deep experience across many disciplines but not all of them. She had previously had the benefit of senior colleagues to augment any gaps, and that type of collaborative partnership worked.
She found quickly that the biggest challenge and opportunity at the C-Level was people, not the technology.
Her engineering team was strong. They researched options thoroughly, evaluated build-versus-buy trade-offs, and brought well-considered and detailed recommendations. Her job became something different: taking what they built and repackaging it for a different audience. The business trusted that the technical details were handled. What it wanted to understand was what business value those decisions would drive.
The executives she briefed wanted the punchline first -- what do you want, how much does it cost, how long will it take, and what do we get for it. She learned to lead with that. When she did, she rarely needed to go beyond the first slide.
The Thing That Was Actually Hard
A harder shift was sole ownership.
Below the CIO level, there had always been someone above her who shared the weight of consequential decisions. As CIO, that was gone.
"The biggest difference is where I would have had others to rely on to make those hard decisions," she said. "Now I'm in a position where I often must make the call alone and I have to own those decisions."
She made mistakes. She owned them. The skill of making good decisions required developing alongside a less comfortable companion: fully owning those that missed the mark.
What Peer Conversations Are Actually For
When asked what kinds of discussions tend to produce the most valuable outcomes in peer settings, Hoemeke did not reach for the obvious answers.
"Discussions around whether we have the right leaders under us -- leaders who could take over for us, or who are going to get us to the next level of growth."
She called these the most uncomfortable conversations, because people tend to protect their own. She has come to see them as non-optional. Everything gets done through other people. A weak link in the leadership tier does not just slow execution -- it determines whether the organization can reach its next stage of maturity. The right time to have that conversation, she said, is well before you need to act on it.
Twenty-two years in financial services taught Hoemeke that the hard parts of the CIO role rarely appear in the job description. The technology was never the real obstacle. The watch-building instinct -- the desire to explain every detail -- was something she had to train herself out of. The often-sole accountability, the talent decisions, the conversations that feel risky to start: that is where the job actually lives.
"The amount of learning you do through the professionals you interact with every day is priceless."