Sheryl Estrada here, standing in for Emma. Betsabe Botaitis started learning accounting at 12 years old, drawn to the discipline for a practical reason: Numbers, she believed, were a way out of poverty. In Mexico, she was enrolled in a vocational middle school program where students train in a specific field. She chose accounting. That early conviction never left her.
Decades later, it has carried her from retail banking to Citigroup to LendingClub, and now, she’s the new CFO at P2P.org, one of the largest institutional crypto staking infrastructure providers globally. Founded in 2018, it provides the behind-the-scenes technology, like servers, validators, security systems. This lets banks, exchanges, digital wallets, and custodians earn rewards from cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Solana across more than 40 blockchain networks, without having to build or run their own systems.
“One of the things that I love is the numbers tell you a story, and they cannot lie,” she told me. “It has been a career path that I’m passionate about, but with the goal of impacting infrastructures that transform people’s life financially.”
She was also an early practitioner of data-driven finance—long before it became a talking point in the C-suite. “Even before CFOs were talking about tech, I was always focused on data strategy, tech, and AI,” she said. At LendingClub, her team was using machine learning to model credit loss behaviors more than a decade ago. “I was trying to bring value by constantly sharpening my skillsets and doing what other people weren’t doing,” she said.
That instinct to go where others haven’t is also personal. After earning her degree and gaining work experience, she immigrated to the United States from Mexico and went on to receive an MBA in finance. But she was grappling with obstacles, saying, “I have an accent. People don’t understand me. I look different,” she said. “But how can I get around it?” Her answer was self-directed: “It was like programming my brain not to see any challenge or hear my own accent, and to just believe I belong.”
The barriers weren’t only internal. “There was one time that a recruiter came to me and said, ‘You’re the most qualified, but you didn’t get any jobs,'” she recalled. “‘Because you’re a woman; you’re Latina, you have all of this experience, and people are kind of scared of you because you also know a lot of tech.'”
She is not alone in navigating that terrain. By the end of 2025, women held approximately 16.5% of CFO roles at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies, down from 17.6% in 2024, but above the 12.2% share they held in 2015, according to the
Crist Kolder Associates Volatility Report. Progress has been slow, and in her career, Botaitis has found her greatest professional sponsors in men, yet women have become her trusted advisors, she said. “When I have a question about business, I call my trusted inner circle. Can you imagine what we can do if we open our doors for each other?”
Serving as an ambassador at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit has been an avenue for her to bring that mindset to other women in finance: “We can reframe the challenge from, ‘How do we thrive in a male-dominated field?’ to ‘How do we support each other?'”
Sheryl Estradasheryl.estrada@fortune.comThe Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’
s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Joey Abrams curated today’s edition. Subscribe here.
