Daniela Mallarino on Customer‑Centric Integration & Open Ecosystems

All right. Welcome back everyone to the Partnership Mastermind Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Lavoie. Today I'm thrilled to be joined by Daniela Mazzarino, Senior Manager of Technology Partnerships at Brex, calling in from New York. Daniela has built, uh, her career at the intersection of partnerships, integration, ecosystems, and go-to-market strategy, with rich experience across AI, access control, security tech, and now fintech. At Brex, she's focused on technology partnerships and embedded partnership opportunities, helping shape how Brex shows up across the software and workflows modern businesses rely on. In today's episode, we're gonna dig deep into her career journey, what makes great technology partnerships actually work, how partnerships are evolving in fintech, and what partner leaders can learn from the way Daniela thinks about ecosystems, execution, and customer experience. Daniela, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Chris.

Amazing. Cool. Well, look, I met you, um, late 2025. You blew my socks off on the first touch point. You just struck me as someone who just wants to be the best, wants to make the biggest impact for your company, for your customers, for the ecosystems you work in, so, um, I'm thrilled to have you on the show. I think you have a lot to offer our audience. We warm up our guests, right, to get the juices flowing with what we call our quick-hitting five rapid questions. So these are just, you know, light, some professional-oriented, some personal-oriented, just get you, let those shoulders relax a bit, let our audience get a glimpse into who you are as a person, and then we'll get into our fun stuff. You cool with that?

Let's do it. Let's rapid fire.

All right. Let's go.

[laughs]

So first one is our origin snapshot. So one word, or, or a couple words I'll give you, but couple words to describe Bogotá, and which languages do you speak?

Awesome. Well, for those of you that don't know, Bogotá is the capital of Colombia, which is, quite frankly, the center of the world, right at the Ecuador mountain city. Um, but one word to describe it, I would say chaotic. [laughs]

Okay.

Uh, certainly chaotic. Ten million people or more living there, so I think it taught me a thing or two about what partnerships could look like.

Okay.

And as far as languages, uh, I speak English, Spanish, and French, although I can get by with Italian. Just don't ask me too much, but I do love pasta, so I can certainly order at a restaurant.

Amazing. Well, uh, she's a fantastic coach. If you're looking, just before this she was coaching me on how to pronounce her, pronounce her last name correctly. Um, and she was gonna let me get by with this, like, lazy American way, so-

[laughs]

... uh, she, she's a very, uh, thoughtful, uh, patient coach. Cool. All right. Second one for you, uh, first partnership win. So what was the first integration you were part of shipping that made you think, "You know what? I, I just love this. I, I wanna do a lot more of this"?

That's a really good question. Um, I honestly think the first one, at least the one that I can recall right now, was with a video company called Spot AI at my previous role in access control and physical