The year in review: The Climb

December 26, 2024 12:00 PM

Last January, American Banker debuted a new column: The Climb, a series of interviews with senior executive women in banking and finance. The women discuss their career paths, their thoughts on leadership and what has changed in the industry since they first started, and offer their advice for young bankers.

Of the 16 profiles published in the past year, nine were of current or former The Most Powerful Women in Banking honorees. And four of the profiles were exit interviews with longtime power women honorees. Sandy Pierce, the former private banking and regional banking director at Huntington, retired last December after spending 40 years in banking, while another 40-year veteran, Suni Harford, the former president of UBS' asset management, retired in March.

Titi Cole, the former head of legacy franchises at Citi, left the industry to work for a nonprofit focused on women and health care. And Diane Morais, the former president of consumer and commercial banking at Ally, stepped down in July and is mulling over her next steps.

The Climb also profiled women at smaller institutions, such as Nicole Lorch, president of First Internet Bank, and Elizabeth Magennis, president of ConnectOne Bank, who have also made their mark on the industry.

Read about their career trajectories and glean insights from these talented executives, listed in alphabetical order.

Citi's Titi Cole on what's changed in banking: The Climb

After a 32-year climb to the highest peaks, Citi executive Titi Cole will soon exit the world of finance as she retires from banking to run a health care nonprofit.

Before she carved out a name for herself as one of the most prolific banking executives, Cole graduated from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria with an economics degree and was hired at her first banking job in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1992. Only a few years later she returned to the U.S., where she was born, to attend Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Business Administration and soon after became an engagement manager for management consulting firm McKinsey in their Chicago office.

Read more about Cole's post-Citi plans.

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First Horizon's CFO Hope Dmuchowski on the secret to her success: The Climb

Hope Dmuchowski, the chief financial officer of First Horizon Bank, got into banking largely due to a chance encounter.

When she was a junior in college, her hometown of Bound Brook, New Jersey, flooded, so she volunteered to help with the cleanup. A Deutsche bank executive was also volunteering and he was struck by her leadership skills.

He offered her a summer internship with the bank, but she initially turned him down. "I had three jobs lined up for the summer. I was waitressing. I was lifeguarding, and I was a full-time nanny. And I wasn't interested in getting on the train every morning for a long commute to New York from where I lived."

Learn more about how Dmuchowski reached the C-suite.

How PNC's Deborah Guild works to protect the bank and its customers: The Climb

Deborah Guild's career path seems preordained. Her grandfather was an examiner at the Federal Reserve of New York and taught her the importance of protecting the American financial ecosystem. She learned to code when she was just 15 years old, and at 19, she was hired by the Florida National Guard to install its first PC-based computer system.

Today, as head of enterprise technology and security at Pittsburgh-based PNC, Guild leads a team of 3,900 staffers and 1,000 contractors who are dedicated to stopping fraud and safeguarding data at the $562 billion-asset bank.

Learn more about how Guild and her team protects PNC from cyberattacks.

Pam Habner of Citi on her career in banking: The Climb

Pam Habner, head of U.S. branded cards and lending at Citi, came from a family of lawyers and thought she would follow in their footsteps. "I took one semester of law classes and quickly decided that it wasn't for me," she said.

After graduating with a degree in math and psychology from Dartmouth College, Habner worked as a consultant for Bain & Company. "I did that because I thought it would be a great introduction to the world of business, working in a variety of industries and working on a range of business problems from how do you grow, how do you re-engineer and how do you cut expenses," she said.

She spent three years at Bain and then headed to Harvard to get an MBA. She discovered that she wanted to be a general manager: "At the time, when you thought of general management, you thought of consumer product companies like General Mills, P&G, Kraft and Clorox." Habner spent a summer internship at Clorox. The experience confirmed that she liked management, but she "wasn't so excited about that business product."

Learn more about how Habner made the move from consulting to banking.

Suni Harford, former president of UBS asset management's exit interview: The Climb

After 40 years in finance, Suni Harford is learning to play golf and mahjong, and is spending more time with family and friends.

Suni Harford retired in March. The former president of UBS asset management had considered retiring a year or two earlier but decided to put it off until UBS completed its acquisition of Credit Suisse in June 2023. "It was a huge opportunity, a great opportunity to do something like the integration of the two companies. I felt it would be premature to leave and add my leaving to the list of changes that the team at UBS were going through, so I decided to wait," she said.

Learn more about Harford's remarkable career in finance.

A love for data jump-started the career of Citizens' chief experience officer: The Climb

Beth Johnson's love of math propelled her into a career in banking.

She grew up in Akron, Ohio, and was intrigued at a young age about the "how and why" of math equations. She credits her parents and public school teachers for being supportive and encouraging of her interest in math.

After graduating from high school, Johnson attended Northwestern University and graduated with a degree in math and economics. The self-described math geek's first job was at Goldman Sachs working as a global risk management analyst. "I like thinking about how you make decisions based on data and insight, and I think banking was a natural transition for that."

Discover more about how Johnson's love of math propelled her into the C-suite.

How Nicole Lorch helped usher in digital-first banking: The Climb

Nicole Lorch started a marketing job at an online-only bank when only a quarter of U.S. households had internet access. Twenty-five years later, she's the president.

In 1999, she was working for David Becker, a serial tech entrepreneur who decided to launch a branchless, digital-only bank. "It was a radical idea in 1999," said Lorch, who became the new bank's marketing director. "I was still renting VHS tapes from Blockbuster."

Becker raised money from investors to start the de novo bank based in Fishers, Indiana. "Normally, a bank our size has to have $5 million to launch a bank. But there was some concern about this crazy internet direct-to-consumer idea, so we launched with $15 million in capital," she recalled.

Learn more about Lorch's experiences during the early days of internet banking.

From teller to president: The Climb

Elizabeth Magennis' first job at a bank was short-lived. She had graduated high school six months early, "and I needed to do something with myself," she said.

She applied to be a teller at a savings bank in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She only lasted three months as a teller because the neighborhood was pretty rough back then, and she wasn't a good teller, she said. "Back then, you had to 'prove' your drawer all the time. And for some reason, I was always over and didn't know how I ended up shorting the clients," Magennis said.

Thankfully, that experience didn't put Magennis off banking. A friend of hers was working at BNY Mellon/Irving Trust Company and told Magennis that she should apply for a job as an assistant for one of its bankers. "He was in charge of the entire branch. There was a business banking unit and retail unit, and he had lending authority. And he gave me a lot of opportunities to be curious and raise my hand and do all kinds of things there. And I really thrived," she recalled.

Learn more about Magennis' ascent in banking.

Wilmington Trust's Doris Meister on a career in wealth management: The Climb

An explanation of what banks do inspired Doris Meister, chair and CEO, Wilmington Trust, to pursue a career in finance.

Meister, who grew up in Michigan, would travel to see her mother's family in New York. Her grandfather was the head of Prudential Savings Bank, and the young Meister would frequently visit him at his office. On one trip, Meister asked her father what banks do. "We were driving to lunch and we were going by all of these apartment buildings, and he said, "Well, banks make it possible to build buildings like these apartment buildings and help people live there. Or they help people buy a home. Banks make the economy work,'" she recalled.

Learn more about Meister's career path.

Ally's Diane Morais looks back on her 37-year career in banking: The Climb

After 37 years in the banking industry, Diane Morais, the former president of consumer and commercial banking at Ally, retired in July.

One year earlier, Morais had a conversation with then-CEO Jeffrey Brown about stepping down. "I told him that I was feeling like my work here was largely done. I had crossed over my 16-year marker, and it's probably time. I never wanted to be that person who's hanging around and overstaying their welcome," she said.

Three months later, Brown announced that he would be leaving Ally at the end of 2023, so Morais decided to stay on bit longer to help with the transition. "I always told Jeff that we can't both leave at the same time, so I committed to helping the new CEO get on board," she said.

Read more about Morais' decision to retire.

BNP Paribas' Barbara Nash on her very early start in finance: The Climb

Barbara Nash's career in finance started when she was 11. She used the money she earned babysitting and shoveling snow to buy stocks. "I was that kid who read about companies and stocks in the newspaper. I also had a coin collection that I invested in, so I've always had a curiosity about finance," she recalled.

By the time she graduated from high school, Nash said she knew she would major in business in college. She majored in finance at Boston University and spent two summers as an intern for Salomon Brothers and Bear Stearns.

Learn more about how Nash went from shoveling snow to leading the technology, media and telecom group at BNP Paribas.

Racquel Oden, HSBC's head of U.S. wealth, private banking, asset management and premier banking.

Racquel Oden's unique path to the top: The Climb

A brief stint at Publishers Clearing House paved the path to finance for Racquel Oden.

She graduated in 1994 from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, with a degree in political science, and was hired into the publishing company's management trainee program. Managing hundreds of employees in its mail room made Oden realize that she enjoyed being a leader.

She went back to school and got an MBA from Hampton University, a private, historically black institution in Virginia. Upon graduation, she was hired as an equity trading associate at Morgan Stanley. "What was great about Morgan Stanley at that time, was they had this equity trading program, so if you were going to be a trader on the desk, they made you go from the back office to the front office," she recalled. "So I went from the operations team to the technology team and then onto a trading desk."

Read more about Oden's rise to the top.

How a background in sales led Darlene Pasquill to Wall Street: The Climb

Darlene Pasquill, head of the Americas equity division for Mizuho Americas, starts most of her days by listening to a leadership podcast. Among her favorites is the Jocko podcast, where retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink shares his thoughts about discipline and leadership. She has studied Nick Saban, the legendary Alabama college football coach, and reads the biographies of historical leaders such as Alexander Hamilton, George Washington and John Adams to help hone her leadership style. "If you listen to the way coaches or leaders speak and how they drive people, it's applicable to Wall Street," she said.

Pasquill started her career in sales at Owens Corning in its textile and industrial products division. "It was a fascinating time in Wall Street history. The company had just thwarted a hostile takeover attempt, and then announced a big restructuring. I had a front row seat watching how fascinating finance was," she recalled.

Read more about Pasquill and her advice to young bankers.

Sandy Pierce, the former private banking and regional banking director at Huntington, welcomes guests at the bank's CEO Dinner in Detroit last fall. Pierce retired in December after spending 40 years in banking.

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Huntington's Sandy Pierce: The exit interview

For the first 16 years of her banking career, Sandy Pierce never shared her upbringing with colleagues. Pierce's parents owned and operated a bar in Detroit, and she and her nine siblings lived above it. She was the only one of her siblings to attend college. She worked part time while attending Wayne State University, first as a cashier in the college bookstore and then as a teller at National Bank of Detroit.

"I never talked about where I came from or how I grew up because I thought that it would hold me back," she said.

Learn more about how Pierce overcame a tough childhood and rose to the top of her profession.

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Synovus' head of treasury and payment solutions on taking risks: The Climb

A chance encounter during a family vacation set the course of Katherine Weislogel's career in banking.

During college, Weislogel interned at a PR firm and intended to be a copywriter when she graduated. But the economy had softened, so the firm wasn't going to be hiring any of its interns.

A month or so after graduation, Weislogel went to Hilton Head, South Carolina, for a planned family vacation. At the time, the family of one of her high school friends was staying at the same island resort. One day, Weislogel was at the pool with her friend and her friend's family. When asked about her plans, Weislogel said she had gotten engaged the night before graduation but had no idea what she was going to do for work. So her friend's father, who happened to be George Schaefer, the CEO of Fifth Third Bank, told her that he could get her a job as a teller at the bank. "I said, 'I'm sorry, but I went to Miami [University] for four years, and worked really, really hard, so I'm not going to start at the teller level,'" Weislogel recalled.

Why Anne Clarke Wolff left big banking: The Climb

Anne Clarke Wolff said that she owes her 34-year career in banking to "serendipity."

She first started working as a consultant for banks that were "heavily driven by econometrics," something she studied as an undergraduate. It wasn't until she enrolled in an MBA program at Northwestern that she began to get an understanding of what a career in finance might look like. "I didn't grow up in that community, so I had no idea what investment banking was versus sales and trading. I thought it was all about being a retail stockbroker," she said.

Learn more about Clarke Wolff's career path and her decision to leave big banking.