Most Powerful Women in Banking: No. 10, Cathy Bessant, Bank of America

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After 40 years on the job, Catherine "Cathy" Pombier Bessant is well ensconced among the sparse but growing ranks of senior stateswomen in finance. Bessant, Bank of America's global technology and operations executive for 12 years, became vice chair of global strategy in September 2021. She has topped American Banker's list of the Most Powerful Women in Banking three years in a row, from 2017 to 2019, and was inducted into American Banker's Hall of Fame in 2020.

But Bessant, who now works out of Paris and advises the $2.5 trillion-asset bank's European boards on regulation and global planning, isn't slowing down. Speaking at an @Work Summit hosted by CNBC in October, Bessant suggested that Bank of America has looked inward at the domestic market more in the past but now plans to become a bigger player on the international stage and engage more with policymakers abroad. Technology made the world "smaller" yet countries also became "more independent," she said, so a single approach no longer works, given the rapid pace of change in governments everywhere.

"We've learned about the problems with focusing on a country-by-country basis and the importance of thinking globally," Bessant said at the summit, referring to hard-learned lessons during the pandemic. Some international suppliers the bank had counted on became ensnared in the global supply chain crisis of 2021 and her colleagues had to think quickly to replace them, in some cases with in-house services that the bank now intends to keep in place.

"Nothing that happens in one country doesn't affect many others," Bessant said.

Bessant began her journey in the town of Jackson, Michigan, population 31,347. She became an English major in college who loved Shakespeare, before switching to study business. She was hired out of the University of Michigan into banking and later took a job at Bank of America in 1982. The English training came in handy, though: She's since found that Shakespeare and Herman Melville, another author she's looked to for inspiration, offered excellent lessons in leadership — especially as many of their narratives are rich with international encounters, commerce, finance and politics.  

One Melville character she's compared herself to, Ahab, suggests that under Bessant's soft-spoken front lies a hungry leader with a broad vision. When she sets her mind to something, Bessant, who described herself as a "bulldog" and unwilling to "fake it 'til you make it," will single-mindedly go about achieving it. This is how she rose up from worst performer to captain of her high school swim team.

It may also be key to her holding  a broad range of senior roles  across  Bank of America, president, Global Corporate Banking; president, Global Product Solutions and Global Treasury Services; chief marketing officer; president, Consumer Real Estate and Community Development Banking; national Small Business Segment executive; and president of the Florida market.  Finally, in 2010, CEO Brian Moynihan named her global technology and operations executive, leading the bank through a pivotal decade of modernizing its technology and streamlining operations.

Bessant is focused on continuing to lead with a style that she believes has caught on more during the pandemic, she told CNBC: "Our people that were leading and managing have forever changed. Empathy is no longer a soft skill, the ability to see things through other's eyes, even when you can't see them right in front of you. ... That ability to combine technical leadership with empathy will set leaders apart in the future."