How these 24 people changed banking in 2024

December 26, 2024 6:00 AM

At the end of last year, American Banker's journalists assembled a list of the individuals we thought would have the greatest impact on banking in 2024. Were we right? Here's an update on what each was up to this year, and how much of a difference they made to the industry.

See who we think are the 25 people who will change banking in 2025.

Sam Altman

CEO, OpenAI

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

In a year that saw increasing numbers of banks start AI projects, Altman continued in his role as one of the unofficial deans of generative AI. OpenAI's ChatGPT system, considered the standard in gen AI over the past two years, changed how people interact with the internet. Its dominance, along with competitors from Google and others, has led experts to wonder if the machines are beginning to take over. It's certain that AI has already begun to radically alter banking, and that's not likely to stop.

Michael Barr

Vice Chair for Supervision, Federal Reserve

Michael Barr, vice chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve, is slated to deliver a speech on Thursday on the central bank's path forward in regulating cryptocurrency.

Al Drago/Bloomberg

Barr has a controversial role at the Fed; many think bank supervision should be handled differently, elsewhere or not by Barr. This year, his big campaign was for new capital rules under the Basel III endgame, which is supposed to impose a more-synchronized regulatory regime on banks globally. But the Fed's proposed rules met with vociferous pushback from banks, and the central bank had to backpedal. Like Chairman Jay Powell, Barr can't actually be fired when the new administration comes in (except for cause). His vice chairmanship expires in 2026 but he can hold his seat on the Fed board until 2032, and he shows no signs of leaving soon.

Joe Biden

President, United States

Ting Shen/Bloomberg

As President Biden exits the White House in January, he can look back at 2024 as a year when his administration most definitely changed banking. So far this year, the Fed began cutting interest rates to fight inflation, the OCC imposed an asset cap on TD after the Canadian bank pleaded guilty to money laundering offenses, and the CFPB went after Google Pay, announcing it would now be supervising the tech giant's payments arm. Bankers had expected even more regulation: the Fed's capital reforms under Basel III, which would have forced large banks to hold more capital, were put on hold and may be altered or scrapped after the Trump administration takes over.

Greg Carmichael

Executive chair, City National Bank

Brought in to mastermind the ongoing turnaround of City National Bank, Greg Carmichael has been working to make the Hollywood-focused bank a good investment for its owner, Royal Bank of Canada. Carmichael, a former CEO and chair of Fifth Third, has a tough assignment, but it's starting to show results. In its third-quarter results, reported in December, City National turned in its best performance in the past six quarters, after it was hit hard by the 2023 regional banking crisis.

"We have to certainly build a better operational infrastructure. We're well on our way to doing that," RBC CEO Dave McKay told analysts during an earnings call. "We've peaked in our expenses there."

Rohit Chopra

Director, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Ron Sachs/Bloomberg

Chopra's on his way out of the CFPB as the administration switches over to Trump's appointees, which could drastically change how it regulates financial services companies. He's had quite a year in the enforcement arena, going after Google Pay, TD and a host of others. Although observers and critics say an expanding authority has marked his tenure at the bureau, Chopra insists he's just following the rules and applying them to companies that handle consumers' money. That's made Elon Musk a detractor, with Trump's government-efficiency advisor calling for eliminating the agency.

Alex Chriss

CEO, PayPal

PayPal

PayPal was an early leader in new kinds of payments — and spawned the managerial class of "PayPal mafia" members who can be found throughout the fintech world and even, in the new administration, in government. But more recently, it's lost its innovation baton, leading the company to bring in Alex Chriss as CEO. The payments company CEO kicked off PayPal's comeback tour with a plan to use more AI in product development, to make checkout faster, and to help merchants and shoppers with a better experience. "We're early in our transformation journey and have a lot of work ahead of us to get to where we want to be," Chriss said on PayPal's third-quarter earnings call.

Jack Dorsey

CEO, Block

Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg

This could be a good year to be a crypto-linked CEO. That's how Jack Dorsey has been reinventing himself. Dorsey, who founded Twitter and payments network Square and runs Block, Square's parent company, has moved his company into bitcoin as well as crypto wallets and other investments in the blockchain world. "We want to make bitcoin more accessible," Dorsey said during a November call discussing Block's third-quarter earnings. As the Trump administration is expected to make the U.S. financial system more crypto-friendly, it could be a good strategy for Block. He's hedging his bets: He also founded Bluesky, a social network billed as Twitter before Elon Musk bought it and transformed it into X.

Jane Fraser

CEO, Citi

Fraser, the Most Powerful Woman in Banking and the only woman among the CEOs of the top 50 U.S. banks by assets, is in the throes of the turnaround she was hired to execute. So far, Citi is making progress, with the Fed lifting an 11-year-old anti-money-laundering enforcement action against the bank. Fraser brought in Viswas Raghavan from J.P.MorganChase, announced a split of Citi's Mexican business in preparation for an eventual IPO, hired an ex-PWC exec to bolster the bank's data integrity, and got so far along the process of cleaning up Citi's various units that the executive in charge of the effort, Titi Cole, announced her retirement. Will it work? That's a 2025 question.

Andrea Gacki

Director, Fincen

Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg

As head of the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, Gacki's in charge of rooting out money laundering, terrorist financing, and other illicit movements of funds through the country and across borders, a job she took in mid-2023. She also spent the year warning banks about the dangers of fraud, including AI-generated deepfakes as well as the problems seniors face from elder abuse. One setback for Fincen under Gacki was a court ruling that imperiled the Corporate Transparency Act's beneficial ownership database, which was set to apply to certain businesses as of January 2025. The act was designed to fight money laundering. But a late-December appeal ruling has the requirement for businesses to register with the database back on track.

Gary Gensler

Chairman, Securities and Exchange Commission

Al Drago/Bloomberg

When Gensler steps down from the SEC in January, he will be able to point to a series of accomplishments since his 2021 arrival. The SEC chair worked on climate-risk disclosure rules, warned about the dangers of AI and approved accounting rule changes for public companies.
Although the SEC approved bitcoin ETFs in 2024, he's known as being pro-regulation for cryptocurrency, which puts him at odds with the incoming Trump administration. Although he's held the line against crypto's migration into the mainstream financial system, it hasn't been easy. Gensler said in September that the ongoing failure to implement executive-compensation rules mandated under Dodd-Frank, but never finalized in the 14 years since, was the Fed's fault.

Martin Gruenberg

Chairman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg

Gruenberg is retiring in January after a tumultuous few years that capped a two-decade-long career at the agency. He served through the global financial crisis of 2008 as well as during 2023's banking crisis, which saw the FDIC play a role in resolving several bank failures, including voting to consider lawsuits against former Silicon Valley Bank executives. This year, he's weathered the agency's 2023 bad-behavior scandal, in which he was accused of not tamping down a culture of harassment, and of having his own anger-management issues at the office.

The FDIC has also drawn fire for its non-response to the Synapse bankruptcy, which in May left thousands of customers unable to access their money when the fintech-middleware vendor went under. Although much of the money was held (and, in some cases, remains) in FDIC-insured bank accounts, the recordkeeping between Synapse and its partner banks failed to show which customers held which funds in which accounts, and the banks have declined to return the money without these records. Gruenberg declined to step in: The FDIC's position has been that deposit insurance only covers the failure of an account holder's bank, which has not happened in this case.

Geoffrey Hinton

Emeritus Professor, University of Toronto

Chloe Ellingson/Bloomberg

2024 was a momentous year for Hinton: He won the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with John Hopfield, for their work on the foundations of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Known as the "godfather of AI," Hinton left Google in 2023, warning that AI carries risks that are too dangerous to allow companies to develop it unchecked. This is a refrain tech thinkers have been echoing — but AI startups continue to proliferate, and big tech companies are ramping up their investments. Many, if not most, banks are also experimenting with AI both for back-office productivity and for working with customers.

Lina Khan

Chair, Federal Trade Commission

Ting Shen/Bloomberg

Khan has taken a pro-competition stance as chair of the FTC, which has made her unpopular with bankers who are interested in doing deals. This year, she spearheaded enforcement actions against companies using AI in deceptive ways, looked into JPMorganChase and Mastercard over data privacy issues, and sued cash-advance app Dave. A Biden appointee, Khan hasn't said when she'll resign, and until her successor is confirmed, she doesn't have to. But Washington-watchers expect that once there's a new chair in place, the FTC will be more focused on pro-business regulations and less on enforcing anti-competition rules.

Mary McDuffie

Former CEO, Navy Federal Credit Union

McDuffie, who was named the Most Powerful Women in Credit Unions in 2023, announced her retirement in September 2023 and retired from the country's largest credit union at the end of February. Her replacement, Dietrich Kuhlmann, a retired rear admiral in the Navy, had been her chief operating officer.

McDuffie had spent 24 years at the credit union, nearly doubling its asset size as CEO. The credit union solved a major issue last year when it finally started a Defense Department contract to take over military-base banking services, after an earlier dustup over whether service members' accounts would have federal deposit insurance. But it ran into a different problem when — after McDuffie stepped down — the CFPB took action against it for improper overdraft fees.

Patrick McHenry

Congressman (R-N.C.)

Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg

As the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, McHenry could often be seen overseeing the questioning of Biden-appointed banking regulators. This year, he could be found asking tough questions of FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg about the agency's workplace-conduct scandal and Gruenberg's refusal to resign. His committee also advanced legislation to soften regulations on ESG and credit card fee caps.

McHenry retired from Congress and didn't run in the 2024 elections. Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.) will take McHenry's place as chairman in the incoming Congress, ushering in what experts expect will be lighter regulation for banks once Capitol Hill and the White House are all in Republican control.

Elon Musk

Owner, X; CEO, Tesla and SpaceX

Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg

Musk is the world's richest person, but in the U.S., he's made more headlines this year for his push to shrink the federal government. Musk became a late backer of Donald Trump during the presidential campaign and has been helping with the transition into the new administration. He's expected to run what he's calling the "Department of Government Efficiency" (yes, that's abbreviated DOGE, a nod to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin).
This streamlining initiative, if it takes hold, has the potential to reshape bank regulation: Musk has said he wants to get rid of the CFPB, for one. It's difficult to consolidate federal agencies, so it remains to be seen if the onetime PayPal co-founder can make this happen.

Prem Natarajan

Chief Scientist; EVP and Head of Enterprise Data and AI, Capital One

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Natarajan sits at the confluence of two big happenings in the banking industry. Capital One, his employer, is trying to buy Discover and create a merged credit cards and payments giant, a deal that should close (the banks hope) in 2025, if it can navigate regulatory obstacles. And banks are rushing to figure out ways to use AI to either save money or make a profit. In October, he said that banks needed to think about privacy, ethics and risk when designing a generative AI rollout, from the very start. "These are not add-on fixes at the end of the implementation cycle. You have to start off in the design phase," he said. Amid a push to distribute AI throughout banks, Natarajan made the AI 100 list this year.

Ted Pick

CEO and Chairman, Morgan Stanley

Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg

It's been a positive first year for Pick, a veteran Morgan Stanley banker who succeeded longtime boss James Gorman, taking over as chairman last January. Third quarter earnings for the firm came in strong because of its wealth management division. Pick said the upswing was a harbinger of a revitalized IPO market expected in 2025. "I would take the view that there are a whole bunch of great companies that are owned privately that do want to make their way into the public markets," Pick said on a conference call with analysts. "That currency allows them to make acquisitions, to set up long-term acquisitions and the like. What I'd expect to see are larger companies going public having been private for some time … I think there is a going-public phenomenon that will exist around the world."

Jay Powell

Chairman, Federal Reserve

Al Drago/Bloomberg

Powell is the face of American monetary policy — so it's not surprising that he has his fans and detractors, including, at times, his former and next boss, President-elect Donald Trump. Although Trump has indicated that he may want to replace Powell, the Fed chair has dibs on his chairmanship until 2026 and on his seat on the Fed board until 2028, and it's not at all clear that it would be legal for Trump to fire him. He had a succinct answer when asked, after a Federal Open Market Committee meeting, whether he'll clear the way by stepping down: "No." In the meantime, Powell continues to fight inflation, a battle that's not yet won. His most recent move, a quarter percentage point downshift in the Fed's policy rate, is another salvo in his campaign to steady the economy.

Michael Rhodes

CEO, Ally

The moving van pulled up twice for Michael Rhodes this year. First, he switched from TD to Discover, taking over as CEO after the bank's longtime chief left. Then Discover announced a deal to be acquired by Capital One. Rhodes wasn't expected to stay with the merged company — and he didn't, moving in March to Ally, where he replaced CEO Jeffrey Brown.
At Ally, Rhodes quickly began making changes at the top with new executives and others in new roles. He's facing what could be a difficult period as the onetime auto lender deals with customer defaults, but has said it's going to get better. "I want to acknowledge the next few quarters will be choppy," Rhodes told analysts on the company's third-quarter earnings call. "I remain confident in our franchise and our ability to deliver compelling returns."

Bill Rogers

CEO, Truist

Al Drago/Bloomberg

Rogers got out his pruning shears this year as he tried to spruce up Truist's financials. The bank kicked off the year by saying it would cut branches and keep costs down, then sold off an asset management unit and the rest of its insurance arm. By the second quarter, Truist was waiting for loan demand to come roaring back; by the third quarter, it was clear that the bank still hadn't recovered from its initial merger pangs. Truist has said it will have more revenue than expenses in 2025, but that's speculative. This could be the year that the BB&T and SunTrust merger finally proves its worth — which must be Rogers' hope.

David Solomon

CEO, Goldman Sachs

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

As Solomon moved away from Goldman's onetime vision of a consumer brand, he continued to reshape the bank. In October, the CFPB hit Goldman and Apple with an enforcement action over Goldman's Apple Card regarding consumer disputes, and the bank sold off its GM card portfolio to Barclays. "I think we've been pretty clear in our messaging that we are continuing to narrow our consumer footprint," Goldman CEO David Solomon said on an Oct.15 earnings call. Goldman is also moving into AI, using gen AI to make its developers more productive. Solomon has become one of the AI converted, saying on an April earnings call with analysts that "We're talking about a level of scale that is candidly unprecedented."

Taylor Swift

Singer

Taylor Hill/TAS23/Getty Images via Bloomberg

By the time Swift wrapped up her worldwide Eras tour, the friendship-bracelet-wearing masses had turned the singer-songwriter into a self-made billionaire. Swift's impact on the payments industry came this year from her ability to generate transaction volume: Every time she came to town, fans poured in, spending money on hotels, merchandise and other travel categories. She even affected the NFL's revenues when she started showing up at games to watch her boyfriend, Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs. Swift was also notable this year for endorsing Kamala Harris for president, writing on social media that she decided to take a stand on the election to outrun deepfakes and misinformation about her endorsement choice.

Sandra Thompson

Director, Federal Housing Finance Agency

Al Drago/Bloomberg

Sandra Thompson will not be the FHFA director to end the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — not this year, at least. The Biden appointee has overseen the housing regulator since 2022. Since the banking crisis of 2023, Thompson's agency has been scrambling to figure out how to overhaul the Federal Home Loan banks, which were significant lenders to the banks that failed. At the heart of this problem is the question of their purpose: Are they supposed to support home loans, as their name suggests? Or are they a more general backstop to the banking system that should lend to member banks no matter whether the purpose is related to mortgages? So far, Thompson has proposed a corporate governance overhaul, suggested changes to how capital buffers are calculated, and insisted that the Federal Home Loan banks consider not just member banks' collateral, but also their finances when lending them money. The broader question of the banks' mission is now an issue for the next administration.