The 25 Women to Watch
September 25, 2016 9:59 PM
1. Nandita Bakhshi
President and CEO, Bank of the West
She has traveled further than just about anyone in banking, culminating with her recent ascension to the top job at one of the nation's 40 largest banks.
But it was not a journey without risk.
On her way to becoming the chief executive at the $77 billion-asset Bank of the West, Nandita Bakhshi repeatedly took calculated career risks. This history major from Calcutta, India, also challenged the cultural expectation that a wife should put her husband's career ahead of her own.
Over time, Bakhshi developed expertise in retail banking. She led integrations of newly acquired banks and learned how to deal with regulators. She became seasoned in navigating the cultural nuances of multinational banks.
But Bakhshi also traces her achievements back to the early years of her career, during the late '80s and early '90s. She started out as a part-time teller before spending time as a branch-based salesperson.
"I understand sales. I know what motivates people in the front lines. I understand what it takes to serve those customers, how do you relate to them, and how do you make sure that you have a 'wow' experience with a customer," she says.
Here are four key traits that Bakhshi identified when asked about moving up to CEO, a title she officially took on July 1.
An Analytical Mind
"I have been a clear thinker," Bakhshi says. "I would say I have the ability to cut through the clutter and kind of go to the point. I'm not an engineer by training. But I think like an engineer. I can break it into little parts, and then I can build it up again. I'm a linear thinker, where I can say ... 'What are the 15 steps?' But at the same time I like to be creative."
A Drive to Improve
"I'm extremely selfish," Bakhshi says. "I like to learn more today than I knew yesterday. So in any environment, I go in and I'm like, 'OK, what is the nugget I picked up?' I'm constantly asking for feedback. 'Tell me what did I do wrong.' 'What could I do better?'"
"I am not afraid of challenges," she says, before adding: "But that's something that has developed over time. I don't know if I came with that."
A Sense of Humility
"I truly believe that as a CEO, or as a leader of an organization, you're in a service role," Bakhshi says. "You're really serving your employees, your colleagues and your customers. And that's ... a value I've always had in me."
The Leadership Gene
"Leading an organization, leading change, leading a culture is what really excites me," Bakhshi says.
"I don't know if I have ever really thought of myself as a CEO and you can't ever really think like that, until you're in the position, and you see what it means. But I've always aspired to be a leader. Whatever I've done, I've aspired to lead the institution, and provide direction strategically, and help the team move and navigate to that strategic direction."
2. Ellen Alemany
Chairman and CEO, CIT Group
Ellen Alemany came out of retirement in the past year to continue a turnaround effort underway at the $66.7 billion-asset CIT Group. She's got her work cut out for her.
The former head of Citizens Financial Group had been a board member at CIT for almost two years when it was announced last fall that she would succeed retiring Wall Street icon John Thain at the helm. She started as president and chief executive of its bank unit in December, before adding the titles of chairman and CEO at the parent company in April.
Among her priorities are slashing expenses, unloading CIT's aircraft financing unit, and shedding its Canadian equipment and commercial finance business. She also is struggling to get CIT under $50 billion of assets to escape designation as a systemically important financial institution and the additional regulatory requirements that come with it. That's a departure from the strategy of Thain, who "wanted to build a really big bank," Alemany recently told analysts.
She said various divestitures in the works or under discussion would leave CIT in the mid-$50 billion range, which, she acknowledged, "is not an optimal position." The earliest CIT likely could escape the SIFI designation is 2018.
CIT was best known as a commercial finance company until it acquired OneWest Bank in Pasadena, Calif., in 2015. CIT recently took a $230 million charge for a business it inherited from OneWest: Financial Freedom, a reverse mortgage servicer under investigation by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. CIT also had to delay filing its 2015 results because of a material weakness at Financial Freedom. CIT plans to exit that business as well.
3. Mary Mack
EVP, Head of Community Banking, Wells Fargo
Of all that Mary Mack accomplished running Wells Fargo's brokerage operations — adding teams of new advisers in key markets, substantially improving her unit's customer satisfaction ratings — perhaps what stood out most was her group's success in attracting new business from the banking side of the house.
Mack made it her mission to foster greater collaboration with Wells' community and private banks, and those efforts started to pay off handsomely last year. Referrals from the community bank — Wells' retail and small-business customers — brought in an average of $1.1 billion of investment assets a month. Referrals from the private bank added $3.4 billion of brokerage assets, while referrals from the brokerage group helped the private bank add nearly $3 billion of high-quality loans and more than $2 billion of trust assets.
Now in her new role overseeing Wells' vast branch network, Mack is in position to further strengthen the ties between the banking and brokerage businesses. "Everything runs through the store," Mack said. "It's our brand, it's our presence in the community, it's our portal to everything we do."
Mack took over as head of Wells' community bank in July, replacing Carrie Tolstedt, who retired.
Though the move would appear to be a departure for Mack, she began her career in retail banking and held high-level banking posts at Wachovia before moving to brokerage about a dozen years ago.
Still, retail banking has changed a lot over the last 12 years, so Mack said her top priority in these first few months will be traveling around the country meeting with front-line employees to help understand what is working well and what Wells can be doing better.
"The front-line team members have the best lens on what the customers need and want," Mack said. "They talk to [customers] every day. They help solve their problems. They are one of our best sources of ideas and information."
She'll have a tough job ahead of her, as Wells works to rebuild trust with customers following revelations that branch employees opened as many as 2 million phony accounts for customers in an effort to hit sales targets. The fraud took place over a period of several years and cost more than 5,000 employees their jobs.
Wells was ordered in September to
4. Andrea Smith
Chief Administrative Officer, Bank of America
Andrea Smith had two job offers when graduating from college in 1988: one at the community bank where she worked while attending Southern Methodist University and another at First Republic Bank in Dallas, one of the country's largest financial institutions then. She accepted the job at First Republic and three weeks later the bank failed in what was one of the most spectacular collapses of the savings and loan crisis.
It was an inauspicious start, but First Republic's failure ended up working out well for Smith. Rather than search for another job, Smith opted to remain with the Bank of America predecessor that assumed First Republic's assets.
She has moved steadily up the ranks since. Smith has been a member of Bank of America's executive leadership team since 2010, first serving as global head of human resources before transitioning last year to chief administrative officer.
This newly created job is a departure for Smith, who has spent the bulk of career in HR. But Smith said that when she was offered the position as global head of HR six years ago she accepted on the condition that it would not be permanent.
"I had other things I wanted to do and so I wanted to make sure this wasn't a lifetime assignment," she said. "The previous two heads of HR stayed in HR for their entire careers, and that was not an attractive path for me."
When she was offered her current job last year one that prompted The Wall Street Journal to call her "The Woman With the Most Stressful Job in Banking" Smith felt ready for it. "It wasn't scary to me because I had been very clear that I wanted to do something else," she said.
Chief among Smith's new responsibilities are overseeing B of A's resolution-planning and stress-testing processes and helping to set global corporate strategy. In her first year in the role, the bank unconditionally passed its annual Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review after passing with conditions last year and failing in 2014.
Her office also oversees the unit that services troubled mortgages dating to the financial crisis, manages vendor relationships and real estate worldwide, and is responsible for global corporate security.
It was Chairman and Chief Executive Brian Moynihan who created the role, but Smith was actively engaged in writing the job description. While the duties appear to have little in common, Smith said they all support Bank of America's eight lines of business. "Operationally, they are the common thread for what we need to be doing," she said.
Smith's advice to other senior executives yearning for more responsibilities is to keep the conversation going. Even while she was running HR for the country's second-largest bank, Smith said she still carved out time to talk to Moynihan about what would be next for her. "It was very much a dialogue throughout," she said. "I encourage people all the time to have that kind of dialogue."
5. Heather Cox
Chief Technology and Digital Officer, USAA
Banks just keep creating new roles for Heather Cox, who is making another job switch this fall.
In 2014, Citigroup hired Cox away from Capital One to develop a digital strategy for its global consumer bank. Last year, Citi created a new fintech arm the mission: build a mobile-first bank and named Cox its CEO.
Then in August, USAA announced that it had lured Cox away from Citi and appointed her chief technology and digital officer. In the newly created post, Cox will oversee information technology, digital strategy and operations, and experience design at the $75 billion-asset USAA. She is expected to start this fall at the online-only bank, which is widely viewed as one of the industry's most innovative institutions.
"Heather's appointment reinforces our service commitment in fast-moving areas like digital, technology and user experience," USAA's president and CEO, Stuart Parker, said when announcing Cox's hire. "She's the right leader to take us where we're going."
Cox oversaw several major tech projects at Citi, including refinements to the bank's mobile app; the development of an app for wearable devices; the expansion of consumer innovation labs across the globe; and Citi FinTech, for which she recruited from the likes of Amazon.
Projects at Citi FinTech begin by assessing customer needs to distill a disruptive idea. The intent is to incubate ideas that can result in making something 10 times better, rather than the 1% or 2% improvements typical of large companies. The very first idea developed through this process which Citi calls Discover 10X is slated to be launched this fall. Though details are being kept quiet, Cox described what is to come as a transformational customer experience.
Such accomplishments helped to earn Cox a seat on McKinsey & Co.'s new Digital Roundtable, an invitation-only panel of experts that will meet quarterly to discuss digital trends in financial services.
6. Susan Skerritt
Chairman, President and CEO, Deutsche Bank Trust Co.
One big job apparently isn't enough for Deutsche Bank's Susan Skerritt.
Since the start of this year, the German banking giant has named Skerritt to not one but two new leadership posts to go along with her role as head of global transaction banking for the Americas.
In January, she was appointed global head of institutional cash management, where she now oversees all aspects of cash management for the bank's financial institutions clients and is among the executives leading efforts to build stronger defenses against money laundering and terrorist financing. Then, on June 1, Skerritt took over as chairman, president and chief executive of Deutsche Bank Trust Co., the unit that houses the bulk of the bank's U.S. assets. In that capacity, Skerritt is largely responsible for directing Deutsche's U.S. banking strategy.
Skerritt admits she was initially hesitant about accepting the new responsibilities because she worried about spreading herself too thin. But she quickly dismissed those concerns, knowing that her top-notch transaction banking team could hold down the fort while she tended to broader issues of regulation, cybersecurity and faster, safer cross-border payments.
Plus, she added, Deutsche Bank's CEO asked. "When Chief Executive John Cryan asks you to do something, you do it."
Skerritt joined Deutsche Bank in 2013 after seven years with the Bank of New York Mellon. She was brought in to speed up growth in transaction banking and she has done that by by encouraging greater collaboration with other business lines, such as asset and wealth management. The Americas unit now accounts for about 42% of global transaction banking's net income, up from 28% in 2013.
Skerritt is viewed as an authentic and accessible leader, but she acknowledges that earlier in her career others may not have seen her that way. "I tend to be a naturally nice person, but when I first became a leader, I thought I had to behave a certain way that I had to be tough and I copied the behavior of others," she said. "Eventually I realized that it didn't feel like me coming through. ...
"I just needed to be myself."
7. Leslie Godridge
Vice Chairman and Co-Head of Wholesale Banking, U.S. Bancorp
U.S. Bancorp wouldn't have much of a wholesale banking business without Leslie Godridge.
The wholesale unit's two main business lines are national corporate banking and global treasury management and Godridge, who joined U.S. Bancorp in 2007, has been the driving force in the growth of both.
First she built the corporate banking unit from a regional player largely confined to the bank's footprint into a national powerhouse that serves more than 1,500 clients and whose loan volume is growing 9.1% a year. Then, in 2014, she took over global treasury management and transformed a money-losing unit into a significant revenue producer.
Godridge in January was promoted to vice chairman and co-head of wholesale banking, one of U.S. Bank's four main business lines. She now also oversees public and nonprofit finance, international banking, corporate specialized industries and several other lines in wholesale banking.
Godridge's influence at the firm extends beyond wholesale banking. She sits on a number of high-ranking committees at the $438 billion-asset U.S. Bancorp, including its management committee and emerging payments and innovation council.
8. Bita Ardalan
Managing Director, Head of Commercial Banking, MUFG Union Bank
To understand what drives Bita Ardalan, you have to go back to the Iranian revolution of 1979.
At the time, her native Iran was paralyzed by protests against the reign of the Shah, and later, by the uneasy transition to an Islamic Republic, and Ardalan was one of many young Iranians who chose to flee the country to escape the unrest.
She settled in the United States, enrolling at Williams College, and though she badly missed the family she left behind — her support system — Ardalan vowed then to make the most of the opportunity given to her.
It's safe to say she has succeeded. Ardalan began her banking career in 1986 as a management trainee at MUFG Union Bank and has been rising up through the ranks ever since. Most recently, in November, she was named head of the bank's newly created commercial banking group, overseeing corporate, middle-market and small-business banking in the bank's West Coast footprint. It marked Ardalan's fourth promotion in four years and continued a pattern of senior executives turning to Ardalan to build new lines of business or turn around existing ones.
Tim Wennes, the West Coast president for San Francisco-based bank, said Bardalan beat out several other "highly qualified contenders" for the commercial banking post "based on her acumen in the commercial lending space and her ability to deliver a strong performance in an increasingly dynamic operating environment."
Ardalan is also playing an increasingly important role in setting overall strategy for the $120 billion-asset bank, a unit of Japan's Mitsubishu UFJ Financial Group. She was one of a handful of executives tapped last year to help find ways to improve efficiency companywide and, more recently, was appointed to the executive committee of the regional bank.
Having escaped a country where opportunities for females are limited, Ardalan has long felt a special obligation to help lift the careers of other women. She has mentored many women over the course of her career, both inside and outside of the bank, offering sage counsel on how to be self-reliant, when to seek assistance and how to best advance their careers.
9. Cate Luzio
EVP, Global Co-Head of International Subsidiary Banking, HSBC
It took justeight months for Cate Luzio to earn her first promotion at HSBC.
Luzio joined the global bank in December 2014 as head of multinational coverage for the Americas, overseeing a team that managed relationships with corporate clients throughout North, South and Central America. Her group produced results so quickly that in August 2015, HSBC assigned Luzio the same role globally, where she now oversees activities of 9,000 commercial clients in dozens of countries where HSBC does business.
Wyatt Crowell, the head of commercial banking for HSBC Bank USA, said Luzio has been an "impact player" since the day she joined HSBC. "Cate doesn't think in terms of single transactions, products or regions," Crowell said. "She finds ways to bring the greatest holistic value to clients in a way that goes above and beyond their expectations."
Among Luzio's key contributions has been realigning operations in the NAFTA region. She quickly recognized when she joined the firm that corporate clients headquartered in the U.S., Mexico and Canada were not fully taking advantage of opportunities in the countries that are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement. With business lagging, she replaced the management teams in those countries and created a steering committee to examine opportunities in the region. She also became a highly visible advocate for NAFTA, speaking frequently at conferences.
Her efforts are paying off: through the first half of this year, revenue generated from clients with activities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico is up 24%.
10. Thasunda Duckett
CEO, Chase Auto Finance, JPMorgan Chase
Inspiring others is what motivates Thasunda Duckett to keep taking on challenging new assignments.
Duckett held several top mortgage-lending jobs at JPMorgan Chase before she was named chief executive of the bank's auto finance arm in early 2013.
On her watch, Chase Auto Finance has reported loan growth in every quarter and jumped from No. 5 in the rankings of the nation's largest auto lenders to No. 2 as of Dec. 31. Perhaps even more important, the financing unit moved from No. 27 to No. 16 in J.D. Power's annual customer satisfaction ratings, largely due to Duckett's efforts to simplify and speed up the loan-application process and improve overall service.
Still, for Duckett, it's not really about the numbers.
What drives her to succeed is knowing that she is a role model for thousands of other JPMorgan staffers, particularly women and minorities.
Duckett, who is African-American, speaks frequently about leadership and development at JPMorgan Chase events and she is an enthusiastic mentor to women and men of color, both inside and outside of the bank. Three years ago, she started a foundation named after her parents, Otis and Rosie Brown to help provide academic opportunities to economically disadvantaged families in north Texas.
"When I'm mentoring people, yes it's helping them, but it's also helping me because it's what motivates me," she said. "I truly believe that my purpose in life is to inspire people."
Duckett said the key bits of advice she offers to up-and-coming leaders are to never lose confidence and that real success requires some sacrifice. But, she tells them, "never sacrifice your health, your family or your character."
11. Sandy Pierce
Senior EVP, Private Client Group and Regional Banking Director and Chair of Michigan, Huntington Bancshares
Even before it closed its acquisition of FirstMerit, Huntington Bancshares made sure it locked up FirstMerit Vice Chairman and Michigan market Chief Executive Sandy Pierce.
Though the deal didn't close until mid-August, Huntington announced in June that Pierce the face of FirstMerit in Michigan since 2013 and one of the state's most visible business leaders would head up its operations in the Wolverine State. The $100 billion-asset Huntington also appointed Pierce to lead two new companywide functions: public affairs and corporate communications and regional marketing.
"Sandy is a well-known regional banking leader with a tremendous drive for results," Huntington Chairman and Chief Executive Stephen Steinour explained in announcing her appointments in June. "I am looking forward to her joining our executive team."
Apart from running the Michigan operations at FirstMerit, Pierce had direct oversight over a wide range of business lines across FirstMerit's five-state footprint, including retail branches, mortgage lending, wealth management and middle-market commercial banking.
One of her key decisions last year was to improve efficiency in mortgage lending by partnering with Quicken Loans. After Quicken started handling underwriting and processing for 70% of FirstMerit's loans in five states, FirstMerit was able to reduce the average time for closing loans by more than two weeks and, importantly, increase mortgage volume by 22% year over year.
In Pierce, Huntington is gaining not just a skilled banker but also a well-connected one. Pierce chairs the Henry Ford Health Center and is a former chair of the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce and the Detroit Financial Advisory Board, an agency created to oversee the city's finances in the wake of its bankruptcy.
12. Mary Ann Scully
Chairman, President and CEO, Howard Bank
The last two years have been transformative ones for Howard Bank in Ellicott City, Md., and much of the credit goes to Mary Ann Scully, its chairman, president and chief executive.
Though the bank had been growing steadily since Scully founded it in 2004, her acquisition of a failed bank in late 2014 and another purchase of a Baltimore bank roughly doubled its asset size and branch count, moved it into several new markets in the greater Baltimore area and significantly raised Howard's profile with investors. Today, Howard has 13 branches, its assets are creeping toward $1 billion and its market capitalization is hovering around $90 million, up from less than $60 million at the end of 2014.
Scully also has proven to be adept at taking advantage of market disruption to attract top talent. Not long after Carrollton Bank in Baltimore merged with local rival Bay Bank, Scully brought in Carrollton's former CEO, Robert Altieri, to build up Howard's mortgage-lending operations.
More recently, she recruited four top commercial lenders from BB&T, including Maryland Regional President James Witty, to strengthen commercial lending. All four had been with Susquehanna Bancshares, which BB&T acquired late last year.
Scully, a longtime executive with the former Allfirst Bank before founding Howard, is one of Maryland's most-respected banking and business leaders. She is a former chairman of the Maryland Bankers Association, serves on the board of the Baltimore Federal Reserve and two years ago was named to a newly formed state commission that recommends ideas for improving Maryland's business climate. Last year, the Daily Record, a Baltimore business newspaper, named Scully one of its "Most Influential Marylanders" for the third time.
Scully is also a powerful advocate for women in business. She is a frequent speaker at women's banking events and since 2007 has been actively involved with Network 2000, a women's networking group.
13. Teresa Tanner
Chief Administrative Officer, Fifth Third Bancorp
The highest-ranking female at Fifth Third Bancorp is actually a relative newcomer to banking.
Teresa Tanner, Fifth Third's chief administrative officer, spent the first 18 years of her career as an executive at McDonald's Corp. before transitioning into banking in 2003.
Tanner made the move largely for personal reasons. She was traveling "100% of the time" for McDonald's and she wanted a job closer to home that would allow her to spend more time with her family.
Her first job in banking was at Provident Bank in Cincinnati, where, as vice president for human resources, Tanner quickly learned she would need to wear many hats. "In the first 30 days, I kept asking 'Who's in charge of this, and who's in charge of that?' and the answers kept coming back to, 'Well, that would be you,'" Tanner said. "It was so different from working at a big global organization like McDonald's."
Still, she enjoyed the new challenge, so when Provident was sold to National City Bank a year later, Tanner chose to remain in banking and landed a job at Fifth Third as head of human resources for the bank's operations and information technology division. She later became chief human resources officer for the overall company and held that job for about six years before being named CAO last year.
Unofficially, Tanner is known around Fifth Third as the chief culture officer. In the run-up to the financial crisis, Tanner believed that bankers from loan officers to senior-most executives had become too deal-focused and had gotten away from doing what's best for the customer. The crisis, she said, forced banks to change the way they do business "and put the customer at the center of every decision."
Tanner has been the driving force behind this cultural shift at Fifth Third.
On her watch, Fifth Third has invested heavily in leadership development training that focuses on collaboration, emotional intelligence, having empathy for customers and co-workers and, as Tanner put it, "those underlying things you can't see on a spreadsheet."
14. Kate Quinn
Chief Strategy and Reputation Officer, U.S. Bancorp
U.S. Bancorp is one of the largest, most respected financial institutions in the country, so it seems almost hard to believe that until Kate Quinn was hired in 2013, it didn't have a consistent branding strategy.
Quinn joined Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp from the health care firm WellPoint, where she had been chief marketing officer. She had previously held senior positions at The Hartford and Cigna.
Quinn was brought on to help the bank develop a consistent corporate strategy and message, and her first order of business was uniting 16 separate divisions including marketing, communications, corporate responsibility and government relations into a newly created office of strategy and corporate affairs. She now heads that division, overseeing a staff of roughly 400 and, since early 2015, has served on the bank's managing committee, reporting directly to Chief Executive Richard Davis.
Perhaps Quinn's most important contribution has been taking the lead on developing a branding strategy that speaks not just to consumer and corporate customers, but also the bank's shareholders and the communities it serves. She brought in teams of outsiders consultants, academics, psychologists to help the bank define what it stands for, then worked with marketing experts on a campaign around its new tagline, "The Power of Possible." The campaign was rolled out in Cincinnati, Denver and Minneapolis. It will eventually go national.
15. Rosilyn Houston
Chief Talent and Culture Executive, BBVA Compass
Rosilyn Houston insists that her new job as BBVA Compass' head of human resources is not all that different from her previous one running consumer and commercial banking for the bank's north Texas region.
Even though the old role came with P&L responsibilities and the new one does not, Houston said the job still comes down to managing and getting the most out of employees. "I've always said this; my job is to make sure I have happy employees. It's to make them feel good about the brand, have access to training and development and access to the tools and resources they need to do their jobs," she said. In the new role her official title is chief talent and culture executive "I've just had to cast a wider net," she said.
Houston has been one of the bank's star performers in recent years. She headed retail banking in the east region from 2011 to 2014 and over that time the region which includes Florida and Alabama outperformed all of the bank's other regions in several key categories, including efficiency ratio and operating profit. It also had the highest customer satisfaction scores with the company for three years running. On her watch, the north Texas region she ran for parts of 2014 and 2015 led all the other regions in operating profit.
In her new role, Houston reports to BBVA Compass Chairman and Chief Executive Manolo Sanchez and to Donna DeAngeles, the global head of talent and culture for the bank's Spanish parent, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria. Announcing her appointment last year, Sanchez described Houston as "optimistic, engaging and energetic," and lauded her ability to get results. "She has a gift for bringing out the best in everyone around her, and her trademark enthusiasm makes her a great fit for this role," he said.
Chief among Houston's new responsibilities is improving employee engagement, which she said she will do by emphasizing "people before strategy." That means involving associates in discussions about strategy to get early buy-in on what the bank aims to accomplish. It also means fostering a more entrepreneurial spirit throughout the $88 billion-asset organization. "As business leaders we get into a room and we think about a strategic plan, but we forget that it requires humans to execute on that plan and be successful," she said. "When you engage your people in the process, you are going to have automatic buy-in, and you get a better outcome."
16. Begonya Klumb
CEO, UMB Healthcare Services, UMB Financial
One secret to Begonya Klumb's success is that she is constantly challenging herself.
Case in point: even with a highly demanding job, two young children at home and scores of volunteer commitments, Klumb recently returned to school to become a licensed certified public accountant. Her thinking was that formal accounting training would improve her understanding of financial reporting and risk management, making her a better, more effective leader.
She hoped, too, that having accounting expertise would prepare her to someday serve on the board of a publicly traded company.
"I wanted to continue with my career advancement and see how far I could push myself," Klumb explained.
Not surprisingly, Klumb passed the four exams on her first try. She expects to receive her CPA license by the end of the year.
Klumb has been chief executive of UMB Financial's Healthcare Services division since June 2015. While she has held a number of executive posts since joining Kansas City, Mo.-based UMB in 2003 including chief strategy officer and head of investor relations this is the first in which she has overseen a revenue-generating business line.
She is making the most of the opportunity. Her unit manages health savings accounts and, in the short time she has run it, total accounts have increased by about 35%, to 826,000, and assets under management have increased by more than 40%, to about $1.5 billion.
Under Klumb, Healthcare Services has invested heavily in technology, hiring a dedicated team of more than 30 IT professionals in an effort to improve the digital experience for customers and more quickly bring products to market. Among its innovations has been a new tech platform that allows customers to manage their investments more easily.
17. Wendy Breuder
Co-General Manager and Head of Midwest General Industries, U.S. Wholesale Banking, MUFG
Inspiration can come from almost anywhere, even a fortune cookie.
For years, MUFG's Wendy Breuder kept taped to her computer a message she found in a fortune cookie that read, "None of the secrets of success will work unless you do." It was a reminder to Breuder that there are no shortcuts to success and that the best way to retain and win business is by outworking competitors.
Few commercial bankers outwork Breuder, a Chicago-based co-general manager of U.S. wholesale banking for MUFG responsible for helping corporate clients in the Midwest find business opportunities overseas.
Two years ago she traveled more than 125,000 miles and went more than nine months without taking a day off in leading her group to its third straight year of record, double-digit revenue growth. Last year, even after inheriting about two dozen clients Breuder considered to be only marginally creditworthy, her group once again exceeded financial targets. Revenue increased 17% year over year and net income increased 15%, to $115 million.
Breuder's work ethic has clearly rubbed off on her staff. In all of MUFG's U.S. wholesale bank, only nine people received promotions in 2015 and six of those nine came from Breuder's Midwest team.
Though company conflict-of-interest policies prevent her from serving on corporate boards herself, Breuder has made it a priority to open doors for other seasoned, female executives. She recently became a member of DirectWomen Board Institute, a national nonprofit that works to increase representation of top female lawyers and executives on corporate boards. She also is a member of Boardroom Bound, a nonprofit that works with corporations to create more diverse boards and to create a culture of social responsibility at the board level.
18. Jill Castilla
Vice Chairman, President and CEO, Citizens Bank of Edmond
One of Jill Castilla's great strengths as a bank president is developing business without spending a whole lot of money on marketing.
Under Castilla, who became president and chief executive in early 2014, the Oklahoma bank has won scores of fans and customers by creating and sponsoring a monthly street festival that has breathed new life into downtown Edmond.
It has helped to prop up local mom-and-pop shops by periodically giving its employees fistfuls of cash to spend at the stores.
And it has built a social media presence that most other banks can only envy. Castilla herself has more than 7,700 followers on Twitter, engaging them not by promoting the bank, but by highlighting goings-on in the community and its customers' success stories. She estimates that Citizens has added $40 million of loans and deposits over the last few years as a direct result of its social media presence.
"People bank with community banks because they know you, and through social media, they feel like they have met us" even when they haven't, Castilla told American Banker last year. "It's like going to a million chamber of commerce events and shaking everyone's hand."
Castilla has, in short order, become one of the industry's most visible community bankers. She speaks frequently at industry events including one recently in Finland about retail banking and branding strategies, and holds leadership, board or committee positions with a number of bank trade associations.
Castilla is also visible in the community serving on boards of business and charitable organizations and she encourages employees to be active as well. As an incentive, the bank offers full-time employees up to five paid days off a year to use for community service or mission trips.
19. Liz Dukes Wolverton
Chief Strategy Officer, Synovus Financial
Liz Wolverton, Synovus Financial's chief strategy officer, admits that she has not always been the best champion for women in the workplace.
As a high-level executive juggling multiple responsibilities while raising two children, Wolverton, who joined Synovus in 2003, did not necessarily view mentoring other women as a high priority. Then last year she was named one of American Banker's 25 Women to Watch and, suddenly, up-and-coming female colleagues at Synovus were reaching out to her seeking advice on how to advance their careers.
Calling it "a lightbulb moment," Wolverton said she now understands how important it is for high-ranking women to make time to open doors for other females. Just recently, in fact, she encouraged one of her longtime team members to accept a leadership role in another division within Synovus even though the employee herself didn't believe she was ready for it.
"It's my responsibility to use the role and influence that I have to help improve the path and development of rising female talent," she said.
Formerly Synovus' director of finance, Wolverton was named to the newly created post of chief strategy officer in 2014 and tasked with nothing less than designing a blueprint to reshape the company for the digital age and positioning it for long-term success.
Reporting directly to Chief Executive Kessel Stelling, Wolverton works closely with the heads of all business units to help set the strategy around everything from budgeting to the delivery of products and services to acquisition opportunities to capital deployment to community and customer relations. A big part of her job is also to nourish a "culture of collaboration" across the various business units to ensure that opportunities and needs identified by business heads align with Synovus' overall strategic plan.
One of Wolverton's favorite phrases is "attitude determines altitude." Smarts matter, of course, but Wolverton said that what she looks for most in employees is a positive attitude. "I would always rather have the most determined, encouraging, find-a-way person on my team than the smartest person in the room," she said.
20. Yvette Hollingsworth Clark
Chief Compliance Officer, Wells Fargo
Among the biggest challenges facing bank compliance officers is making sure all employees are playing by the rules. At a large organization like Wells Fargo, which employs more than 230,000 people in thousands of offices in the U.S. and abroad, it is virtually impossible to know if staffers are properly filing suspicious activity reports or following know-your-customer guidelines.
Yet chief compliance officers, like Wells Fargo's Yvette Hollingsworth Clark, remain deeply worried that, in the current regulatory climate, they could be held liable for the misconduct of others. So last year Hollingsworth Clark spearheaded an industrywide initiative to develop a so-called "Compliance Officer Bill of Rights."
The primary aim, said Hollingsworth Clark, is to educate regulators about the role of compliance officers and to help them understand what should be reasonably expected of them. While the document, authored by prominent banking attorney Jerry Buckley, is still a work in progress, it lays out some very specific protections for compliance officers, such as exemption from claims of personal responsibility unless there is evidence of negligent conduct. It also asks that companies pay compliance officer's legal fees in defending against allegations of misconduct.
Hollingsworth Clark said that if she were going to make one change to banking regulation it would be to "remove the punitive enforcement culture" that took hold following the financial crisis. She suggested that regulators require banks submit formal plans of their operating practices and assess penalties only if they veer from the plan and cause harm to customers.
"The penalties that are being paid by financial institutions take away from the investment that the industry needs to improve its foundational operating practices," she said.
21. Karen Glenn
President and CEO, First United Bank and Trust Co.
When the chief executive job at First United Bank and Trust opened up in 2010, Karen Glenn, then the Kentucky bank's chief financial officer, didn't bother to apply.
As a single mom to twin boys one with autism, the other recovering from cancer treatments Glenn felt she had as much responsibility as she could handle. Plus she lived nearly an hour away from the bank's Madisonville headquarters and the job required the CEO to live and work in the community. "I didn't think the board would hire a blond, 38-year-old female from another community to run their company," Glenn said.
Then, in the midst of a nationwide search for a CEO, a board member encouraged Glenn to apply. She agreed and in a one-hour interview before the full (all-male) board, Glenn laid out her plan for how she would run the bank and improve its performance. Among her ideas: streamline management and shutter the unprofitable brokerage unit.
She was offered the job the next day. "I was speechless," Glenn said.
Glenn took over as president and CEO in July 2010. As CFO, Glenn hadn't been very visible, so one of her first priorities was introducing herself to the community and to customers. She moved the family to Madisonville, joined the local Rotary Club and chamber of commerce and became active in area nonprofits. Through a partnership she created between the bank and the city, Glenn became the driving force behind the construction of a new events plaza downtown. "I went from a back-office-type job to being the face of the bank," she said.
Her challenge was figuring out how to expand the bank in a slow-growing community. At first, Glenn focused on managing expenses and lowering the bank's cost of funds, and her efforts there are big reasons First United enjoyed record profits last year and kept its net interest margin above 4%.
But cost-cutting can only take the bank so far, so last year Glenn made her boldest move to date with a deal to acquire the $85 million-asset Bank of Ohio County in Beaver Dam, Ky. With that deal, the first in its 20-year history, First United boosted its assets by nearly 45%, to $275 million.
22. Angela Birmingham
Head of Bank Operations, Oversight, Service and Technology, Charles Schwab Bank
Angela Birmingham has held a number of high-ranking banking jobs in her career, but until she started helping her oldest daughter with college applications last year she had never given much thought to being a role model for other women.
In her college essays, Birmingham's daughter, Madeline, singled out her "strong, working" mom as being one of her greatest influences. That heartened Birmingham and made her feel a little less guilty about all those school activities she missed but it made her question if, in her role as Charles Schwab Bank's highest-ranking woman, she was fully supporting the careers of other women. "I never used to think of myself as a woman in business," Birmingham said. "I was just a professional going to work every day like everyone around me."
That's changing. Now, in addition to the myriad responsibilities that come with heading operations for one of the country's fastest-growing banks, Birmingham is making more time for mentoring women and becoming far more active in the bank's women's networks. She is also paying much closer attention to hiring and promotion practices to make sure women are getting proper consideration.
"I need to make sure I am inspiring, supporting and developing the next generation of women in a purposeful way across Schwab and the industry, and that I am using my leadership voice and role to influence change where needed," Birmingham said.
Birmingham joined Schwab from Bank of America in 2006 as a Midwest regional executive and she has headed operations, service and technology since 2010. In the six years she's been in her current role, assets of Schwab Bank have more than tripled, to $150 billion, as its number of deposit accounts has roughly quadrupled, to over one million today.
23. Ellen Patterson
General Counsel and Head of Compliance, Legal and AML, TD Bank
Though the general counsel and head of compliance at TD Bank is primarily responsible for making sure the bank's business units are playing by the rules, Ellen Patterson says it is also her team's mission to root out inefficiencies that might be slowing down decision-making and causing pain to customers.
Example: A review of call-center operations concluded that calls took too long and Patterson wondered if the problem was with call center agents' scripts. She and her team reviewed them and, by removing unnecessary words and simplifying terms, they substantially cut call times and improved the experience for the customer. The bank calculated that the shorter call times resulted in a savings equal to the salaries of seven full-time employees.
Patterson a former law firm partner also undertook a review of the bank's relationship with outside law firms and found millions in savings by reducing its approved list of partners and renegotiating terms and fees.
Patterson joined TD Bank in 2012 from the law firm Simpson, Thatcher & Bartlett. She was happy in the job, but was eager for a new challenge and joined TD largely because she was intrigued with the idea of helping to set corporate strategy. She is one of 15 executives on the bank's management team, reporting directly to Chief Executive Mike Pedersen. She also works closely with Norie Campbell, the group head and general counsel with TD Bank Group, the Toronto-based parent.
Patterson is already one of the bank's leading champions for female employees. Last year she was named executive sponsor of its Women in Leadership group, which is dedicated to mentoring the next generation of female leaders.
24. Michelle Di Gangi
EVP, Small and Medium-Size Enterprise Banking, Bank of the West
Michelle Di Gangi is quietly building Bank of the West into a force in small- and midsize-business lending.
For four straight years, the San Francisco bank has been the nation's fastest-growing lender to small and midsize firms, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., consistently posting double-digit growth in loan production and loan volume. Under Di Gangi, the $77 billion-asset Bank of the West has become an active Small Business Administration lender and now ranks No. 2 in the nation in originating the SBA's real estate-focused 504 loans. The unit generates 20% of Bank of the West's total loans and 23% of its deposits.
Di Gangi has expanded the business both the old-fashioned way adding scores of new lenders and the 21st-century way: leveraging technology.
The unit had just 50 employees when Di Gangi took it over in 2008; it now has more than 700.
Under Di Gangi, the division has also invested heavily in data analytics to, among other things, better understand the differences between highly profitable customers and not-so-profitable ones. Such information can be crucial to helping bankers determine cross-selling strategies, Di Gangi said.
Di Gangi also spearheaded a branch concept geared toward small and midsize firms and their owners' needs. The first opened in Seattle last year and turned a profit in record time for a de novo branch. Others have opened in Tacoma, Phoenix and San Diego.
25. Joan Parsons
EVP, Corporate Banking, Silicon Valley Bank
Any bank or nonbank lender with designs on courting more technology and life sciences business often will look to raid talent from Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, Calif. After all, Silicon Valley has long been the go-to bank for growing tech firms and its bankers are highly valued by competitors for their expertise and the relationships they have built.
Retaining this talent is top priority of Joan Parsons, the bank's executive vice president for corporate banking, so last year she launched an internal development program that provides top employees with new experiences and challenges that might ultimately prevent them from jumping ship. It's a competitive program roughly 7,000 employees have applied since its inception and only 130 have gone through it but those who are accepted are given ample opportunities to stretch themselves through rotations in other departments or stints in the bank's London or China offices. Senior executives have called the program a "game-changing contribution" to the bank's talent-development efforts.
Parsons held a number of managerial posts at the bank before being promoted to her current post in January 2014. A direct report to President and Chief Executive Greg Becker, Parsons oversees a wide range of activities including mezzanine and debt financing, syndicate lending and deposit and investment services for the bank's tech and life sciences clients.
She's also seen as an innovator. Last year Parsons expanded the bank's mezzanine financing program to focus on latter-stage companies, spearheaded the creation of an advisory arm that helps clients set strategy and opened an office in Houston to further grow its clean technology practice. Those initiatives were among the reasons that the corporate banking group reported a 20% increase in loan volume last year, as well as a 33% increase in deposits and a 14% increase in fee income.
Parsons is a founding member of the bank's diversity and inclusion committee. One of her key initiatives in supporting other women at the firm was creating a job-sharing program for working mothers.
