Rakefet Russak-Aminoach transitioned from corporate banking to venture capital at Team8.
She was CEO of Israel’s largest bank and founded Israel’s first mobile-only bank.
Russak-Aminoach told BI that dramatic disruption is coming as a result of AI.
Rakefet Russak-Aminoach started her career as an accountant, and today she’s the managing partner of an Israeli startup foundry. Her unconventional path was made even more indirect by multiple stops in C-suites on the way.
She was CEO of KPMG Israel. And then she was the CEO of what is now Israel’s largest bank. At Bank Leumi, she orchestrated a massive, disruptive technological shift, becoming Salesforce’s first customer in Israel and bringing — sometimes dragging — the bank into the digital age.
She also founded Israel’s first mobile-only bank. But now, she’s moved off the corporate ladder and into venture capital as Managing Partner of Team8 — a startup foundry.
Russak-Aminoach spoke to Business Insider about how her corporate career informs her tech investing.
This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
How did you get into VC?
When I decided to step down from the bank, I didn’t have the option that many CEOs have — to take on a larger company. Because there wasn’t one.
I decided that I wanted to be in the best industry in Israel, and that was tech.
To transform Bank Leumi, I often didn’t build the technology; many times, I worked with fintechs. As an organization, we always asked ourselves, ‘Should we buy? Or should we build?
I made Bank Leumi much, much more advanced with digital tools, but I wanted to have an app to attract more youngsters to the bank. This became Israel’s fastest-growing bank.
So I was very much into the high-tech world. And even more than that, at a certain point, I said, ‘How come we don’t have a bank tailored to startups in Israel?’
So I built Leumitech, which is a very successful segment of Bank Leumi today.
Two years into my tenure, I had a cybersecurity event at the bank, and I needed help. I met Nadav Zafrir, the CEO of Check Point Software, a cybersecurity company.
The incident itself was terrible, but they were amazing. And I gained a friend. Eventually, when I decided to leave banking, the only thing that was interesting to me was tech.
So he said, ‘Why don’t you try building Fintech?’. Fast-forward five years, and we lead a group of cyber, fintech, data, enterprise tech, and digital health startups.
Our company, which has 80 employees, 12 partners, has helped build 23 startups and invested in 25 more.
Do you think job losses from AI are going to increase at some point in the future?
Absolutely, because when the tool is there and you don’t disrupt yourself, you don’t make this change to your organization — someone else will. No one can continue to work without AI when there is AI.
Take banks, for example. In any bank, there are so many parts that you can now replace with AI, processes, people, just everything. And if you are a responsible CEO, you must do that.
You have lots of functions that were built with people, and you start to embed AI within them. It takes time to see the result. AI is still new for many, and I don’t think we have seen the full impact. It’s just the beginning.
In a few years, many parts of financial services —and other organizations — will be built from scratch with AI agents, and then you will embed the human within.
Does it scare you from a societal standpoint?
No, because I remember that conversation around the digital revolution.
I started my tenure at Bank Leumi with 14,000 people. I ended after seven years with 9,000. And now, five years later, there are 7,000. So people ask me, ‘What’s going to happen to the workforce?’ New jobs. The world is changing, and the way people work is different, and people find different things to do. I don’t think that people will be out of work.
I extensively research the credit world because that’s my professional background. I think tech can be used to enhance credit underwriting. It will be much more efficient, and it will be less risky because humans make mistakes, and the user experience will be better. So it will be just win, win, win.
And then the question is, what will all of these credit officers do? Something else — I’m not worried about that. At this point, I’ve seen many technological advancements, and it has never gone the wrong way.
How do you use AI?
It’s not nice to say, but I don’t know how I ever just Googled things. I completely left Google. I only use ChatGPT now, but I’m not sure that it’s the best one either. It’s just the one I use. It writes my emails. It helps me with every question. I just live with it. And a few months ago, I didn’t even know it existed.
Talk me through that. If you have 30 emails to write in a day, what do you do?
I dictate, I don’t even write. I’ll say, “‘I need an email saying XYZ.'” Many of my emails are just an answer to another email. So I copy it and I say, ‘Answer this email positively.’
And then, at the end, ChatGPT will ask, ‘Do you want it to be more casual, or more polite, or more formal?’. It’s incredible.
