Membership Directory - Individual

Ashton Montgomery-Norris

Senior Customer Success Manager at Encompass Corporation

About

Bio: Ashton is a Senior Customer Success Manager for Encompass Corporation, working closely with a number of Tier 1 Financial Institutions headquartered in the UK, Europe & the US.

He has been based out of Encompass's Glasgow office since 2018, and in addition to delivering success for Encompass's customers he has taken an active lead in Encompass's Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) group, with a particular focus & contribution to the LGBTQIA+ and Mental Health & Neurodiversity working groups and their outputs.
At Encompass, Ashton has headed up the LGBTQIA+ working group, creating internal resources on LGBTQIA+ terminology, personal pronouns at work, and accessible introductions to LGBTQIA+ topics in popular media. He organised an external speaker to speak on Queer Representation in Videogames, which attracted a wider audience from across our employee locations and provided a great talking point for wider LGBTQIA+ themes, and was a speaker himself at a Scottish Financial Enterprise event in June 2023 on Building an Inclusive Workplace, sharing his experiences as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community in FinTech alongside speakers from abdrn and Capco.
Ashton also participates within the Mental Health & Neurodiversity working group at Encompass, helping create useful resources on managing mental health at work and publicising the resources available for all employees to promote better mental health as part of our working practices.
Financial Services encapsulates a huge community of people, and requires people to be able to bring their full selves to what can be an extremely demanding and fast-paced sector. Even in 2023, we are continuing to see young people in the workplace feel that they need to hide their identity within the LGBTQIA+ community in order to get ahead. We need clear LGBTQIA+ role models and allies to encourage everyone to feel comfortable, acceptable and safe in their workplaces, so that financial services organisations can fully represent the communities they serve and continue to attract the best talent available.
Ashton is proudest of the work he has done in conjunction with the People Team in reviewing Encompass's parental leave policy to ensure that this is representative of all types of families, and believes that this will benefit all employees across Encompass's offices.
I am proud to be a Project 1000 role model as a member of the Financial Technology sector, which can often be characterised as fairly homogenous, and which I'm happy to help disprove! On a personal level, being an open member of the LGBTQIA+ community for me was unthinkable when I left school, and I am proud of my achievements as a gay man in the world of work. I want to represent and encourage everyone in this sector to be open as themselves and continue to work together to create a more inclusive workplace for everyone.
Project 1000