When news of her promotion broke in January, Lisa McGeough, HSBC's newly named U.S. president and CEO, said she was taken aback when people would ask if she was surprised at being elevated from her role as co-head of global banking. "It wasn't an accident. It was all intentional. It required a tremendous amount of hard work, resilience and focus," she said.
Her path to HSBC's door in 2021 took many turns. More than anything, though, McGeough made sure she was on everyone's radar. She advocated for herself and used her business performance and team leadership to reinforce why she was valuable to the units she led and the clients she served.
The hard work began nearly four decades ago when McGeough joined Salomon Brothers, later acquired by Travelers Group and ultimately part of Citigroup. She was an economics major at Bowdoin College in Maine and was recruited when representatives of the investment bank visited the campus. "I'm not sure I knew exactly what I was applying for, but I had a very positive interview," she recalled.
She went to New York City and went through 14 interviews before she was offered a job. McGeough was one of just 12 women in a training class of 65. She initially wanted to be a trader but was told that "girls don't trade." She instead focused on fixed-income sales.
One of the most formative experiences of her early career was a trading gaffe she made on the phone — all trades in the '80s were done over the phone — at Salomon. "I said 'bid' when I should have said 'offer,' and I was quickly reprimanded," she said. While it was humiliating, McGeough said she learned an important lesson. "It taught me precision, focus and that mistakes cost money."
She left Salomon for Prudential Bache in 1987 to work in its high-yield fund. She was reluctant to leave Salomon but said the move was motivated by another lesson she learned early on: compensation matters. "I felt that we were underpaid relative to the market. And that my expertise was valuable. And that's when I started to understand the market and the value of my talent," she said.
McGeough spent three years at Prudential Bache and left in 1990 to stay home with her three children, whom she had in a little more than three years, while her husband continued working. When their youngest child turned 2, McGeough sat down with her husband and said she couldn't stay home anymore. "I had the opportunity to step out and step back in. But today, I'm not sure that opportunity would be afforded to a lot of people. When you take that much time off, it's harder to come back in," she said.
She was recruited to run a high-yield startup fund by Toronto Dominion, which was then a very small Canadian bank. She spent two years at TD before she was poached again, this time by Morgan Stanley, to work in leveraged finance. "I loved the breadth of exposure I experienced during my eight years there. I worked in high yield, convertible bonds, [collateralized loan obligations] and IPOs for some of the biggest, fastest-growing companies," she said.
When the tech bubble burst in 2000, McGeough said that then-Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack taught her how a leader should behave in times of crisis. "He would walk the floors, connect with colleagues and ask, 'How are you doing? How's business? What's going on with the client? Is there anything I can do to help?'"
In 2005, she was recruited to join Wachovia Securities as a managing director for leveraged finance, in Charlotte, N.C. She'd been spending three hours a day commuting from Connecticut to New York City for Morgan Stanley, and the thought of spending less time commuting and more time with her family made the offer appealing.
At the height of the financial crisis, Wachovia — hit by massive losses in 2008, with $23.9 billion lost in the third quarter alone, largely tied to its adjustable-rate mortgage portfolio — was being pushed by regulators to sell. Wells Fargo and Citigroup were vying to take over Wachovia; Wells won out with a $15.1 billion all-stock deal.
After the acquisition, McGeough was tasked with leading the Institutional Client Group effort, serving as the chief liaison to the top 50 institutional partners of Wells' newly merged securities business. She spent nearly five years in that role and after lobbying to work in London, Wells agreed to send her there in 2013 to help U.S. clients who wanted to expand internationally.
Once she moved to London, she spent time with the leaders of the business lines to get a sense of their jobs and responsibilities. "They were not sufficiently aligned to the U.S. headquarters. Their strategy was dated — they were still talking about the financial crisis — and they didn't connect with each other and the myriad products and services the bank offered," she said.
She was further shocked to find out that there was not a head of Wells Fargo Securities for EMEA, so she set about pitching the role and the responsibilities required to take it on. "I quickly went about doing what was required," she said. She held team session meetings with the business line leaders to reset strategy and connect with their U.S. counterparts, restructured the leadership team and the way it worked, and helped the team figure out how to leverage client relationships in the U.S. to serve them internationally.
"I started developing a bit of a playbook by listening and learning where the gaps are, how do I reorganize and reorient the team, how do I refresh strategy, how do I make it relevant to the colleagues on the ground, and then execute. Putting the right people in the right seat doing the right things is always the key," she said.
McGeough's strategy paid off immediately — revenue more than doubled in the first year — and her efforts in taking on the role were rewarded with a new title: CEO of Wells Fargo Securities International.
In early 2016, McGeough was approached by the head of Wells' wholesale banking division, who asked her to come back to the U.S. and run its industrial group. "I said, 'No, thank you. I'm very happy here.' And he said to me, 'You don't understand what I'm saying. I need you to come back to the U.S.'"
The $10 billion-portfolio industrial group needed a reset, he said, and given how she had turned the division around in London, she was the ideal candidate for the job.
She spent the next year revamping the strategy and rebuilding the industrial group's team. The head of Wells' wholesale banking division reached out to her again, asking McGeough to combine the industrial group, financial institutions group, and commercial and investment bank into one team. Once again, McGeough relied on her playbook to guide her in this massive restructuring.
In July 2018, McGeough was promoted to co-head of corporate and investment banking. The bank wanted her to have a large corner office, but she found that idea a bit mortifying until she was reminded she was one of the few very senior female leaders. "It's about the power of representation. Seeing a woman in an office visible on the floor meant something. A lot of women would pop in and trouble shoot or talk about difficult career moments for them," she recalled.
McGeough was asked to return to London after the departure of the head of international at Wells Fargo, so she spent the next year and a half commuting between London and Ireland to rework that team and its strategy. "It was a significant reset, and we had regulatory attention that was appropriate but that wasn't favorable. So I had the opportunity to reset that team, make sure we had the right people, identify the root-cause issues, present solutions and turn it around," she said.
By fall 2019, however, things at Wells were about to change. In October, Charles Scharf took over as CEO and created his own executive committee as he prepared to remake the image of the bank after the
McGeough, who was not involved nor implicated in the scandal, understood why Scharf needed to establish a new executive committee but said that one of the reasons she decided to leave was because the legacy of what others had done — the creation of fake accounts and the resulting regulatory fines that tarnished the bank's brand — continued to hang over staffers.
She had moved back to New York and was contemplating her next move when an executive search firm reached out and said HSBC was looking for a head of global banking Europe. "I'd been thinking about HSBC, because when I was in Europe, I was like, 'Gosh, these guys are really hard to beat every time.' And when clients talk about international, they don't talk about Wells, they talk about HSBC," McGeough said.
She spoke a few times at length about compensation, a discussion with the search firm that brought up a pain point McGeough still hadn't resolved from her early days in the industry. "When the headhunter told me what my market value was, I was a bit shocked and disappointed in myself that I hadn't done a better job advocating for myself. The punch line wasn't where it should have been, I did the job but the compensation didn't seem to equate to my efforts," she said.
And while she had addressed her compensation in more recent positions, she noted that once you are underpaid, it can take years — if ever — to get caught up.
She recalled an incident at one bank where she was allowed to see its compensation file due to her seniority, and she found that she was on the bottom of the second page in compensation compared to her peers. She went to her boss at the time and told him it was unacceptable. He agreed and said, "I'm going to walk you up but you have to realize that it will be a slow walk up. We'll get you there incrementally."
"You have to be advocating for the right outcomes for yourself, whether it be pay, promotion or a new job opportunity. Looking back I could see where I cost myself and my family some money," McGeough said.
McGeough joined HSBC in London in June 2021. The prior head of global banking for Europe, Philippe Henry, had exited, so McGeough once again embarked on a listening tour with the team. Once she had gathered all of the intel, she made sure the right leaders were in the right seats and came up with a strategy to "evangelize" HSBC's European value proposition. "We ended up outperforming in results — revenue up, costs down, returns up, client-engagement scores were better. But the activities required to get us there were considerable. It wasn't accidental. We had to make the bank simpler and more agile," McGeough said.
She was asked to add the Middle East to her remit, and along with her co-head of global banking, Gerry Keefe, they achieved similar results in the region.
In September 2024, HSBC promoted Georges Elherdy, its former group chief financial officer, to group CEO. Elherdy embarked on an ambitious restructuring. Hong Kong and U.K. operations are now two standalone divisions. The bank combined corporate and institutional banking into one unit and international wealth and premier banking into another, and with those two units divided between Eastern markets — Asia Pacific and the Middle East — and Western markets encompassing its non-ring-fenced U.K. bank, Americas operation, and business in continental Europe.
In January, McGeough was elevated to president and CEO of HSBC U.S. "People think you're just asked to interview, you interview, and you get the job. That's not how it works. It's time with board members, time with operating committee members, time with the CEO, time with your network, your brand, making sure everybody understands your value proposition and your contributions as you present the business and advocate for the business. It's not an accident that I was on the radar, so I think that personal advocacy is required every minute of every day, as well as team engagement, stakeholder engagement, inside and outside," she said.
Looking ahead, McGeough said she's excited about the new CIB structure and her role as U.S. CEO. She ticked off some of the bank's stats: "We bank 90% of the Fortune 100 companies. We are top three in every product in global transaction banking, with ambitions to be the number one corporate and institutional bank globally in our core areas of strength. We're the number one trade bank in the world — we facilitated $855 billion in transactions last year. We're the number two payments bank in the world — we processed over $500 trillion in payments. We're strong in debt capital markets and leveraged finance, so pulling all of these products and capabilities together to serve our clients in a more agile and nimble way, and with the U.S. contributing to these efforts, [that] remains the focus," she said.
But don't expect McGeough to put away her playbook anytime soon. "When there is change, it's an opportunity to take a fresh look at your leadership team and say, 'Are these the right people in the right seats doing the right things for the future of the business? How do we make [the strategy] most relevant for the United States? Is everyone clear on their marching orders? Are they empowered to execute?'" she said.
"It's an exciting time but it can also be a stressful time. And as a leader, I'm very mindful that it's not just about me–it's everything I do represents the U.S., represents our colleagues and our clients," she said.
