Diana Bergano – EarnIn

Every day of the week for two years, Diana Bergano’s alarm went off at 4 a.m. Before the coffee finished brewing, she was already at her desk, a photo of her young son propped beside her laptop, and a small slip of paper next to it that read, “Commitment is what turns a promise into reality.” She would study for the California bar exam, wake her son for school, put in a full day of work, then come home and study again. The words on that slip of paper were not decorations; they were and still are a daily mantra that Bergano applies to her personal and professional life.

Diana Bergano | EarnIn | Assistant General Counsel, Head of Privacy

Bergano had already earned the title of lawyer once, in Colombia, after graduating from Universidad de La Sabana and beginning her career in-house at financial institutions there. When she moved to the United States in her late twenties without speaking English, she lost the ability to practice the profession that had shaped so much of her identity. She enrolled in paralegal school at San Francisco State University to find her footing in an unfamiliar legal system, and there, a professor told her something that changed the direction of her career: she could sit for the California bar without repeating law school.

What commitment costs

Learning the language alone took many years. She confesses a voice in her head told her, “Your English is not good enough.” One day, she decided to mute that voice and take the risk. “The worst that could happen is that I fail,” Bergano told herself. When she did not pass the bar exam on her first attempt in 2017, the disappointment was significant, but a 40-mile bicycle ride afterward gave her the clarity she needed.

“It was my strategy that failed, not I,” says Bergano.

She rebuilt her approach for her second try, practicing under timed conditions, reviewing hundreds of past essays and memorizing writing structures that graders responded to best. The day before the exam, rather than cramming, she went for a hike, ate a good meal and rested. She passed in 2018, a year in which fewer than 41 percent of applicants succeeded. Earning her license to practice law in California restored her professional confidence and sense of purpose; it also gave her son a living example that success is not about getting it right the first time — it is about working hard, planning, and not giving up. That persistence paid off — and it is still paying off, one relationship at a time. Not long after earning her California law license, Bergano was promoted to legal counsel at Blackhawk Network, where she had already worked for a couple of years as a senior contracts manager. She is quick to credit Blackhawk for that chapter: they invested in her bar exam preparation, gave her the flexibility she needed to study, and did not hesitate to recognize her as the licensed attorney she had become. It was there she met a general counsel who took her under his wing — first recruiting her to a company expanding into Latin America, and later bringing her into EarnIn, the fintech company where she now leads the privacy and AI governance program.

Learning a field before it had answers

Bergano’s shift into privacy law happened almost by accident. When the European Union’s GDPR took effect, she volunteered at Blackhawk to help build its GDPR compliance program. She recognized that privacy was moving quickly, would only grow more important, and could set her apart in a legal market where her international background had once felt like a limitation. What started as an unfamiliar assignment quickly became a passion. Bergano dedicated herself to learning everything she could about privacy law, attending conferences, seeking out mentors in the field, and pursuing certifications that most attorneys at the time had not even considered. She holds three certifications from the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP): Certified Information Privacy Professional/United States (CIPP/US), Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM), and Fellow of Information Privacy (FIP), and is currently preparing for the fourth one: Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional (AIGP).

Bergano joined EarnIn in November 2022 and now serves as assistant general counsel and head of data privacy at the fast-growing financial technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. EarnIn offers a suite of products, including financial tools that let customers access a portion of their wages as they earn them, a payroll software platform, and more recently, a jobs board.

Bergano works across technology, cybersecurity, engineering, product, marketing and compliance to help the company grow responsibly with a consumer-first mindset. Her goal is to position data privacy as one of the company’s key differentiators. “Consumer trust is critical in fintech. Today’s consumers care deeply about how companies use their data, especially their financial data,” Says Bergano. She’s made privacy by design a priority at every stage of the product lifecycle, alongside giving customers clear, truthful, and timely information and choices about how EarnIn uses their data and how the products work.

EarnIn’s original purpose was narrow: help people gain earlier access to money they had already earned. Bergano has watched that model widen well beyond a single consumer product. The company has expanded from a primarily consumer-facing business into business-to-business and business-to-business-to-consumer services, acquiring a payroll-processing platform along with EarnBetter, an AI-powered employment platform that helps job seekers build resumes, prepare for interviews and understand salary ranges. The goal, as Bergano describes it, is one connected ecosystem where a user can find a job, access their payroll information, get paid in real time, and access financial wellness tools without leaving EarnIn’s app. She also values that the company’s founder remains CEO, keeping the original mission at the center of the business as it grows.

Building the rules as the technology moves

Bergano is spending most of her energy on artificial intelligence, designing and implementing EarnIn’s AI governance program. She works with the company’s leadership on AI oversight and ethical use.

I think that AI is amazing. I am 100% all in, and so is my company. In a fintech space this fast-moving, success comes down to a few things: embracing new technology and training your staff to use it ethically; setting the right controls for your data and company size; and having the right partners — vendors and law firms who can keep pace with both the speed and the risks involved,” Bergano says.

She points to AI agents as the next governance puzzle: tracking who builds and deploys them, what tasks they perform and what data they access. Bergano does not see the technology as a threat to her profession so much as a tool that sharpens it, provided lawyers stay disciplined about what they feed into it and use their critical thinking.

“Overreliance on AI is an issue. Using it to work more efficiently doesn’t mean you should switch your brain off. The critical and strategic thinking are what lawyers are hired for, and that’s easy to forget when a tool is doing some of the work for you,” says Bergano.

Life outside the law

Outside of EarnIn, Bergano has found another place to put her expertise to use. She provides pro bono counsel to Alternative Family Services, a California organization supporting children and families in the foster care system, advising on data privacy, cybersecurity and AI governance while picking up a working knowledge of healthcare privacy law along the way. It is a natural extension of a career built on the belief that expertise is worth little if it is not shared.

Bergano has recently taken up golf, a hobby that has become new bonding time with her son. She still starts most mornings very early, walking her energetic young Labrador, Bruno, and meditating for twenty minutes before the workday begins. The early start and disciplined time management it took to study for the California bar exam became habits she still practices today.