Mariana Pinheiro: Cultural Adaptation, Career Agility, and Leading Through Challenging Times

#LevelUp is a podcast for anyone interested in improving their leadership skills. This series is designed to help you get to know the leaders of Experian and gain insight into the skills needed to grow your career. You can subscribe to #LevelUp Leadership on  iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud and Spotify.  

In this episode, Mariana Pinheiro, CEO of Experian Spanish Latin America, shares her insights on leadership amid a pandemic. Mariana discusses her journey of becoming a leader and offers tips for those looking to develop their own leadership style. She also highlights the importance of having a willingness to learn and adapting one’s leadership style to build relationships across diverse cultures. Additionally, Mariana shares her personal mentorship journey, ambitious goals for the future, and what excites her most about her career. 

Here are highlights from this conversation:  

• Leadership lessons learned while running a business during pandemic
• Mariana’s journey learning Spanish as a Portuguese speaker 
• The importance of having a willingness to learn
• Building a diverse network while working remotely 

You can also catch the full video conversation with Mariana Pinheiro here.

About Mariana Pinheiro 

Mariana Pinheiro is a highly accomplished business leader who currently serves as the CEO of Experian Spanish Latin America. She joined Experian in December 2013 as President of the Digital Certificate business in Brazil, and since then has held key positions within the organization. Since the beginning of FY21 Mariana has been leading the Spanish Latin America region with focus on growth and increase of profitability. She has been leading the search for efficiency and productivity improvement opportunities in the region, promoting transformation initiatives, stronger control processes, finance transition activities to SSC, and people cost control. She also promoted the diversification of SME and ECS businesses, through proposals and digital solutions, which have allowed these verticals to leverage their growth and expand the reach of their audiences, responding proactively to new market needs. In addition, she has successfully led the acquisition and integration processes of the region’s recent M&A of credit bureaus in Chile and Panama. 

She is a strong ambassador for Women in Experian and in general for our DEI strategy in the region. Her people-focused leadership style and development has led the region to achieve the highest levels of engagement and sense of belonging in metrics such as Great Place to Work, achieving 4 certifications with them and several external recognitions in the countries of the region. 

In her previous role, she led the acceleration of the Decision Analytics in Brazil fully transforming the business go-to-market approach, enhancing products value propositions, and improving the delivery capabilities. Over this period our market footprint improved significantly in region across our software and platform solutions, enabling the business growth to almost triple in size. As BU President for Decision Analytics & Marketing Services in Brazil Mariana created synergies between the two business units, improving efficiency and leveraging solutions that integrates both DA and MS products to drive value to our clients. In the first 18 months with Experian, Mariana led the Digital Certificate business, in a time of declining sales and increased competition, having improved productivity, implemented business controls and increased margins.   

Prior to joining Experian, Mariana held senior leadership roles at Visa Brazil and Redecard, where she helped drive significant growth and improved productivity. Mariana holds an Executive MBA from Universidade de São Paulo and a degree in Computer Science from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.