Meet the Team: Ellie O’Toole

When I was six years old, I booked my first show: The Music Man. Every night the curtain would open, and I’d be perched on top of a real stagecoach, singing about a certain bank’s wagon and wondering, even then, if there might be something in that world for me.

Turns out there was. It just took me a while to find it.

I grew up in Utah, the daughter of a mainframe engineer and a writer. For years I did not think much about what that pairing gave me. But now, as a Customer Support Analyst at KlariVis, it puts me squarely between the technical and the human, which is right where I have always been most at home.

 

Starting on the Stage

For a long time I thought the stage was where I was headed. I studied opera in college and absolutely loved it. Like a lot of students, I needed a part-time job to get me through, so I walked into a bank near campus and applied to be a teller. It made more sense in hindsight than it did at the time.

Then, unfortunately, an injury ended my singing career. I had spent my whole life planning for one thing, and then it was gone. And suddenly, the job I had taken almost by accident turned out to be the one that fit.

Over the next eighteen years, that work took me from Utah to Alaska, down to Idaho, and eventually across the country. I worked in consumer banking and affluent client management, moved through quality assurance, and wrote business processes and procedures. I even stepped away from the bank for a while to work in farm credit as a business analyst. By the time I came back to banking, I knew I wanted to work for smaller community banks, the ones that truly care about the people they serve.

 

Finding KlariVis

By then I wanted more than another role. I wanted a place in fintech where I could actually make a difference in the products being built. The nudge came from home. My husband, who is building his own data dashboard for the movie industry, stumbled onto the KlariVis site one day and sent it to me.

What brought me in was the platform itself. I have seen my share of Power BI dashboards and spreadsheets, and I have watched reporting projects take years to build and then quietly get shelved. KlariVis was different in a way that made me stop and look twice. The answers were simply there, right away. Clients could see where their portfolio stood every single day. Work that used to take weeks came together in a fraction of the time. The more I learned, the more I noticed how much time the platform hands back to the people using it.

If I am honest, though, the thing that truly sold me was a single photograph of the whole team together in matching purple shirts. Finding a company making real strides in the industry is one thing. Finding one where the people clearly like their work and each other is rarer, and that felt worth moving toward.

 

Becoming the Slingshot

There was another reason a company like this pulled me in. Working at a large bank, I had a front-row seat to an industry-wide reckoning, and I watched how far the fallout traveled from the rooms where the decisions were actually made. After that, I stopped wanting to work for the giant. I wanted to help the smaller institutions standing in its shadow.

What I learned along the way is that you cannot always beat Goliath, no matter how hard you throw yourself at him. So you become the slingshot instead.

Is any of this where I pictured myself at six years old, up on that stagecoach? Not remotely. But that is the fun of it. We each get to write our own story, and mine has taken me a long way from where it started.

 

Looking Ahead

Right now I am learning KlariVis from the inside out. My curiosity runs straight to everything happening behind the scenes, and my goal for the year ahead is to become an expert in it. The more I understand about our back-end systems, the more I can do for the banks I support. When a client comes to me with a question, I want to have the answer ready, so they can put their energy where it belongs, growing in their communities.

Ask me for one wish for the people I serve and I know exactly what it would be: I want every client to be able to find the answer they need at the moment they need it, without waiting on anyone, including me. Becoming that kind of resource is the work I am proud to be part of.

 

Off the Clock

When the workday ends, you will find me on our little homestead in rural Virginia, with my hands in the garden, working on a piece of stained glass, or gaming with my family. It’s a long way from the extreme weather swings and year-round construction traffic I left behind, and I would not change it for anything.

If there is one thing I would tell that six-year-old on the stagecoach, or anyone still writing their own winding story, it is this: embrace chaos and grace equally.

Connect with me on LinkedIn!