Career turn takes exec to the top
     By: ANDREW PHELPS - For the North County Times

DEL MAR HEIGHTS — What Lale White did nearly nine years ago might have labeled her a deviant in her native Turkey. But here in the United States, the worst she has been called is idealistic.

In 1997, White was a career woman who decided to leave a longtime job and start her own company. At 50, White is chairwoman and chief executive officer of XIFIN – say "hyphen" with a Z – a 42-person operation in Del Mar Heights that has seen 3,000 percent growth in four years. The company designs Web-based accounting software for medical laboratories.

Deloitte, a financial firm, recently put XIFIN at No. 5 on its Technology Fast 50 list for San Diego.

“The opportunity that this country provides, in my mind, is beyond anywhere else in the world,” White said Tuesday

in her office, where replicas of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution hang in gold frames.

“I’m privileged to be a citizen.”

Born of Turkish parents who moved to Springfield, Ill., when she was 1, White grew up in middle America and found herself back in Istanbul for high school.

“That was a very drastic change at that age for me. I was very, very concerned about college and what would happen for me.”

She had moved from the Midwest to the Middle East — from Lincoln Land to a struggling democracy that survived by military might alone. Stubborn old-world customs persisted.

“I was very surprised at how many women didn't have any intention of going past high school, if that.”

Her father, intent on raising his daughter into literacy, decided to head back west when a military coup loomed in the late ‘70s. “I came to school one day, and there was a student with a rifle standing at the gate, telling us to go back home,” she said.

White’s experience imbued deep appreciation for Western values and heightened her awareness of global business. She realized a responsibility to “equalize” world populations through trade, and that propelled her success in business, she says.

In her 21 years working at LabCorp, a Burlington, N.C., company, she saw an industry heavy with bureaucratic fat. A staggering number of insurance claims in health care — 40 percent, she says — are denied over confusion about policy. Patients, at the end of the chain, suffer from higher costs.

Working at one of the company’s offices in La Jolla, White left LabCorp as vice president of finance and took three others with her to found XIFIN. They dreamed up software that links clinical labs — companies that process blood work, usually — and insurance companies and physicians.

Instead of selling the system in a box, XIFIN lets customers subscribe to a dynamic, Web-based system. Customers pay a fee on each transaction.

White calls it “hybrid outsourcing.” Her company saves customers the burden of understanding ever-morphing industry regulations. Daily changes in the tax code, new FDA rules — the software is updated automatically.

White says her biggest job as CEO is saleswoman, trying to persuade health care companies to try her newfangled system.

Rarely an early adopter, “health care is probably more behind in technology than any other sector in the U.S. marketplace,” White said.

In her leather-clad office in a swank, 16,000-square-foot corporate building, White says she is achieving her worldly goal — to reduce health care costs — with a small contribution. Her corporate customers compose 2 percent of the health care pie, she says, but a huge chunk of insurance traffic.

“From the experience we have with our accounts, we‘ve achieved exactly what we thought we would achieve,” White said.

She said she believes strongly that her opportunity lay only in America. But she exposes a real soft spot for Turkey, which she illustrates as spectacularly beautiful and rich in history.

Rancho Santa Fe, where she lives with her husband, is pretty nice, too, she says.