The Most Powerful Women in Banking: Next 2024

July 29, 2024 9:03 AM

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Each year, ahead of our Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance list, American Banker puts together a list of 15 women who are rising stars at their banks. The honorees, all women 40 years old and younger, are nominated by an executive at their institutions who believes that each has the potential to ascend to the C-suite. And many of them appear to be well on their way.

This year, there are five managing directors on the list, as well as a chief risk officer, a director of retail banking, and heads of global markets corporate banking, global short rates sales and liquidity and interest rate risk.

Nine of the 15 honorees are at the same institution where they started their industry careers: Megan Comfort started as a teller at Nevada State Bank; Natalie Flanders started as an intern at First Horizon; Natalie Wech started as a trainee at M&T Bank; Denise Davis started as an analyst at PNC; Willette Shalishali started in Synovus's leadership training program; Amy Bartlett started at BMO as an analyst; Amanda Deckelman started as an intern at Merrill Lynch and stayed on after it was bought by Bank of America; and Mallory Niemczyk started in an entry level position at what was GMAC and is now Ally Financial.

A majority of this year's honorees said that they either started their careers during the 2008 financial crisis or that it impacted the direction of their career paths. Shayna Arrington, now the chief risk officer at Servbank, was working for the Justice Department and was supposed to be in its bank fraud unit, but ended up working in its mortgage fraud unit.

"I fell down the rabbit hole of loan origination and mortgage compliance in 2008 at the height of the crisis," she said.

And Majdouline Melhaoui, head of liquidity and interest rate risk for the Americas at BNP Paribas, was finishing a masters degree in finance in France when the subprime mortgage crisis hit. The crisis made Melhaoui interested in understanding more about "the relationship between banks and the financial market and the economy in general," she said.

Congratulations to our 2024 Most Powerful Women in Banking: Next honorees.

Shayna Arrington, Servbank

Chief risk officer

Shayna Arrington always knew she was going to work in finance. She earned an MBA with a concentration in finance from the University of Buffalo School of Management, and then earned a law degree with a concentration in financial transactions from the University of Buffalo School of Law.

During law school, Arrington spent her summers interning in Washington, D.C., for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice in their enforcement divisions.

Learn more about Arrington's career.

Amy Bartlett, BMO

Managing director, head of global markets corporate banking at BMO Capital Markets

Growing up in the small Illinois town of Roscoe, Amy Bartlett never imagined that she would go into banking. Today, she holds BMO's House Discretionary Limit, which means she is one of a handful at the bank allowed to recommend that the CEO or chief risk officer extend more than the bank's maximum credit limit to a client.

Bartlett joined BMO in 2007 as an analyst working with large diversified companies, and has stayed at the bank since in its Chicago office, now also supervising bankers in Toronto and New York.

Learn more about Bartlett's career.

Jillian Chuck, Comerica

Senior vice president, director of commercial deposits, revenue & liquidity

Jillian Chuck has learned about providing a high-touch customer experience through an unusual avenue — by working in her parents' Jamaican restaurant.

Food is what initially brought her parents together. Chuck's father immigrated to the U.S. to attend school and met her mother, who was working in his uncle's bakery.

Learn more about Chuck's career.

Megan Comfort, Nevada State Bank

Executive vice president, small business manager

Megan Comfort got into banking on the advice of her mother. Comfort's mother, an immigrant from the Philippines, worked as a bank teller for most of Comfort's childhood, and urged her daughter to go into banking because of the benefits and the opportunity to try different roles.

Immediately after high school, Comfort began working as a teller at Nevada State Bank, a subsidiary of Zions Bancorp. Three years later, she joined the small-business banking team at the bank. "That's when I fell in love with banking. I loved helping small-business owners," she said.

Learn more about Comfort's career.

Denise Davis, PNC Bank

Managing director, senior vice president

Denise Davis describes herself as "a numbers nerd," who fell in love with banking after an internship at PNC Bank while attending the University of Pittsburgh.

After a dozen years with the bank, Davis is now a managing director and senior relationship manager within PNC Bank's energy group, which ranks among the top revenue-generating businesses for the bank with more than $3 billion of deployed capital and a portfolio of dozens of clients.

Learn more about Davis' career.

Amanda Deckelman, Bank of America

Managing director, head of global short rates sales

Fixed income is at the center of the economy, and Amanda Deckelman sees her job as crucial to the market's functioning.

"How the government funds itself through the Treasury market is critical to how people live," she said. It's one part of how central Wall Street is to the American economy: "People's retirement savings, pensions — it's at the heart of where everyone's savings and wealth originates."

Learn more about Deckelman's career.

Layna Dupuis, First United Bank

Director of retail banking, senior vice president

Layna Dupuis started in banking as a high schooler. "I was an incoming junior," Dupuis said. "I wanted to work. I needed to work. I come from a hardworking family. As soon as we can work, we work," she said.

Fortunately for Dupuis, who had been passed over by two other prospective employers, her mother had a friend at the community bank in nearby Idabel, Oklahoma, who agreed to hire her. It didn't take long for the 16-year-old to realize she had a talent for what she termed "the service side" of banking.

Learn more about Dupuis' career.

Natalie Flanders, First Horizon Bank

Senior vice president, investor relations officer

Natalie Flanders started her banking career at First Horizon as an intern. During her senior year in college, she took classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to be able to work full days on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. "I started my time here in 2009, which was a pretty terrible time to get started in banking. But it weirdly turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I learned so much by starting in the middle of a financial crisis," she said.

Learn more about Flanders' career.

Jo Jagadish, TD Bank

Executive vice president, head of U.S. digital banking and commercial bank products, services & innovation

Jo Jagadish's experience running a microbusiness where she created custom invitations for weddings, bar mitzvahs and birthdays has fed into her dual role as head of U.S. digital banking and corporate products and services at TD Bank, a subsidiary of Toronto-based TD Bank Group.

"You are the CEO, the chief marketing officer, the chief technology officer and the chief financial officer," said Jagadish. "You're focused on growing your business but the tools you needed to run it were not that easy to find."

Learn more about Jagadish's career.

Majdouline Melhaoui, BNP Paribas

Head of liquidity and interest rate risk, Americas

In 2007, Majdouline Melhaoui was finishing a master's degree in finance in France when the subprime mortgage crisis hit. "It was getting a lot of attention, especially in response to its impact on the economy, so I was really interested to understand more about the interconnectivity, between banks and the financial market and the economy in general," she said.

Melhaoui was required to take a 12-month internship in order to finish her master's and ended up interning in the liquidity department at a French bank. She fell in love with liquidity, and when she graduated, she went to work for BNP Paribas as a liquidity analyst.

Learn more about Melhaoui's career.

Mallory Niemczyk, Ally Financial

Senior director, invest and deposits business operations and analytics

The Flint, Michigan, native was recruited out of Michigan State University to work at what was then GMAC, an arm of General Motors. The entry-level job in planning and analysis looked interesting for a finance major, especially in 2008, when the global financial crisis was taking hold. "It was an interesting time to be entering the workforce," she recalled of her time in the Detroit office.

The following year, as the bank was rebranding to Ally, Niemczyk moved to the bank's office in Charlotte, North Carolina, a place where she didn't know anyone. "I view that time in my career as an excellent foundation that has served me really well over the years in terms of learning the basics, building blocks and fundamentals and economics of a consumer business and what the value drivers are," she said.

Learn more about Niemczyk's journey.

Jessica Payne, The Raine Group

Managing director

The biggest initial public offering of 2023 — chipmaker ARM's September debut on Nasdaq, which valued the U.K.-based company at $54.5 billion — marked a memorable day for investment banker Jessica Payne, who advised ARM on the deal.

"Going down to the stock exchange, watching it happen live, going out into Times Square and taking all the photos, all the hype around it," she recalled. "It was a really great day."

Learn more about Payne's career.

Willette Shalishali, Synovus

Senior director, talent management and development

An employee benefit event at Synovus helped lead Willette Shalishali down her current career path.

Shalishali joined the Columbus, Georgia-based bank after meeting with a recruiter at her alma mater, the University of Georgia. "I am originally from Columbus, Georgia, and it had this respected vibe in my head," she said of Synovus. "I thought maybe I should move home for a little bit."

Learn more about Shalishali's career.

Natalie Wech, M&T Bank

Senior vice president, business banking regional manager

Natalie Wech isn't the banker one would expect to meet when walking into a branch of M&T Bank in southern Pennsylvania. The Zimbabwean native, who grew up spending summers visiting family in Greece, speaks five languages and had a previous stint as a professional ballerina before coming to the U.S. for university "to experience a different continent," she said.

As a student at Penn State, where she earned undergraduate and MBA degrees, Wech met Michael Murchie, an M&T regional executive who has since retired, at a student event. He convinced her that rather than leaving the U.S. after graduation, she should join the bank's development program.

Learn more about Wech's career.

Kerry White, Citigroup

Managing director, Citi investment management

Kerry White's banking career began in 2012 on the trading floor at Citigroup. A native of Northern New Jersey, White had recently graduated from Harvard University and said she found herself "enamored with the concept of seeing the world unfold" from the perspective of the trading floor.

She was also drawn to the idea of building an international career, and Citi — one of the world's largest banks with on-the-ground operations in 95 countries — could provide that opportunity.

Learn more about White's career.