From the outside, Teresa Heitsenrether's career is a straight-line path of success. After earning a bachelor's degree in finance from Fordham University, she began work at JPMorgan Chase in 1987.
After a series of managerial roles, Heitsenrether ascended in 2015 to her current perch as head of Global Securities Services. She is chief custodian of $33 trillion (yes, trillion) in client assets, providing services to the biggest governments, pension funds and institutional investment managers in the world. In 2021, Global Securities Services reported a record $4.4 billion in revenue, while posting a 30% operating margin.
Heitsenrether has at times been the only woman at the table. Today, she is one of seven women on JPMorgan Chase's 18-person operating committee. She also plays a leading role in the company's Women on the Move program to help women advance careers in finance. (Her father worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.) Having "different perspectives around the table" is important, she said.
At JPMorgan, she continues the mammoth undertaking of making Global Securities Services trove of data more client-friendly.
In May, Global Securities Services introduced Fusion for the firm's institutional investor clients. It is a data management platform with client information alongside JPMorgan Chase proprietary data and third-party data. The goal is to provide "end-to-end data management," the company has said.
Also in May, Global Securities Services announced its first transaction using a tokenized collateral network to trade tokenized money market shares. Heitsenrether said that the transaction was merely a test run. But one advantage may be the ability to use a wider range of assets as collateral through tokenized representation, Heitsenrether said.
Another experiment JPMorgan Chase is conducting is hybrid work. Heitsenrether sees this as potentially beneficial to women bankers, who were previously stigmatized, she said, for work from home.
"I think there used to be a mental model where only some jobs lent themselves to flexibility," she said.
