Mallory Niemczyk has faced down two crises and turned them into opportunities for her career.
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.
Next, she spent a half-dozen years working with the bank's deposit products, "learning about the consumer-facing components of the business — deposits, acquisition, go-to-market strategy, digital, customer experience, operations, customer service." Around 2015, Ally was relaunching direct-to-consumer mortgages, and she switched into that group so that she could help "build something from the ground up," she said. In 2019, she was invited back to the deposit unit, where she works today.
Silicon Valley Bank's failure and the ensuing banking crisis of March 2023 shook midsize banks like Ally, which now has $193 billion in assets. Niemczyk was asked to lead a project to measure and monitor the bank's retail deposits. Her round-the-clock work impressed senior managers, and in April 2023 she was promoted to her current position.
"It was never something I set out to do on purpose, to lead an analytics organization as a nontechnical person," she said. "The whole SVB challenge unlocked an area of interest for me and led to the next step in my career."
With 16 years at the company, Niemczyk is an Ally lifer. She pointed to the support of bank executives like
A lifelong athlete, and current volleyball player, Niemczyk credits sports and her family with ingraining a sense of integrity, work ethic and team-first orientation. "It's not about me," she said. "It's about the success of the team and the company."
