Arianna Huffington will be the keynote speaker at the 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking awards dinner hosted by American Banker on Oct. 6, 2011, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.
Best known as the founder of The Huffington Post, recently sold to AOL for $315 million, Huffington made considerable waves in late 2009 with Move Your Money, a movement urging customers of "too big to fail" banks to switch their accounts to community banks.
Huffington, now the president and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post Media Group, stands out as a savvy entrepreneur in an industry dominated and often dictated by men, and has been recognized accordingly.
She was named one of Forbes' most influential women in media in 2009, made Financial Times' list of 50 people who shaped the decade and was also named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world.
Huffington founded The Huffington Post as a website and blog in 2005 and has since built it into a media empire that reaches more than 25 million readers a month. She has written 13 books, ranging in topic from politics to biographies to the changing roles of women.
