TalkDesk founder and SIBS CEO among the most powerful women in Portuguese technology and telecoms
TalkDesk founder Cristina Fonseca and SIBS CEO Madalena Tomé have made the Forbes Portugal list of the most influential women in technology and telecoms in the country.
Cristina Fonseca (Pictured) co-founded the unicorn TalkDesk with Tiago Paiva and is currently a partner at Indico Capital Partner, where she helps other startups to grow.
An engineer by profession, the businesswoman from Ourém was in fourth position in the category Technology and Communications with a total of 63 points.
At the age of 24, Cristina joined Tiago Paiva and founded TalkDesk in 2011. The two had been colleagues at Lisbon higher education institution Instituto Superior Técnico. Today the unicorn is valued at more than US$10Bn (€9Bn).
Despite this success, Cristina Fonseca would leave the company in 2016, remaining a shareholder with an undisclosed private stake.
In 2019, she was awarded the Dona Antónia Adelaide Ferreira Revelation Award, being recognised for her life path “with relevance in the affirmation and development phase”.
Since April 2019, she has also been a non-executive director of Galp.
Madalena Tomé, the CEO of Lisbon-based payments company SIBS went in at third position in the Forbes ranking.
One of the most recognised senior management figures in the financial technology sector, she was one of the 55 women highlighted in the annual Forbes Portugal ranking.
Recently, Madalena Tomé was highlighted as one of the 25 women leaders in financial technology across Europe, according to “The Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology Report of Europe 2023“, being also the only Portuguese to make the list.
Tomé graduated in Applied Mathematics at ISEG in 1999 and holds a postgraduate degree in Market Studies and a CRM from Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
On graduating, she began her career at Andersen Consulting, where she spent just over two years, having spent another two years at Deloitte. When she left Deloitte, Tomé worked as a consultant at McKinsey.
2009 would be a turning point: leaving McKinsey and joining the Portugal Telecom group, she made a career within telecommunications until 2015, the year he joined SIBs which developed the MB Way and Multibanco ATM payment systems. It was in the former Portugal Telecom that Madalena Tomé served as Director of Commercial Operations, Director of Remote Channels, Online and New Channels for the SME segment.
Madalena Tomé also achieved an executive training qualification in Management from Insead and in Leadership from Harvard Business School.
In May this year, she was reappointed to another term at the head of SIBS, the fourth three-year term since she joined the company to take up the position of CEO.
Candy Flores, a businesswoman from Funchal, Madeira, who created Madalia World, is the 5th most influential woman on the Forbes Portugal list in the same category.
Candy Flores, born in Madeira in 1987, founded Lim9 12 years ago, and more recently co-founded Dimmersions and Madalia World, companies that offer augmented reality, virtual reality and metaverse solutions.
Forbes Portugal Magazine places this year among the five Most Powerful Women in Technology and Telecommunications, with a total score of 56 points.
Madalia World, a platform that reproduces Madeira, was the first virtual world in the metaverse recognised by a government worldwide. Founded in 2022, it aims to be a digital platform for sustainability and content co-creation, where virtual actions have an impact on the real world.
