No. 16: Eileen Serra, JPMorgan Chase

Eileen Serra
CEO, Chase Card Services, JPMorgan Chase

Eileen Serra spends a lot of her time trying to make JPMorgan Chase's 63 million credit card accounts as secure as possible.

Over the last two years, the banking industry has been hit by a series of data breaches, including a major attack on Chase in 2014. Its credit card division, led by Serra since August 2012, has emerged as an industry leader in efforts to better protect customers' personal information.

Serra, a former executive at Merrill Lynch and American Express, is of the opinion that there isn't one overarching solution to fraud prevention. So under her leadership, Chase Card Services has rolled out an overlapping set of initiatives designed to keep customer information safe, both in retail stores and online.

Chase was one of the inaugural card issuers participating in Apple Pay, which launched in October 2014 and marked a key step forward in payment security. Apple Pay uses tokenization technology to protect the 16-digit credit card number during the checkout process.

Separately, Chase Card Services has invested in tokenization technology for online and mobile payments. And it has issued more than 20 million chip-enabled cards over the last year; those cards should help reduce fraud at brick-and-mortar retailers.

Serra is the only female chief executive at any of the six largest credit card issuers. Her extracurricular activities include several focused on helping women. She is heavily involved in a Chase program for female employees who want to build their leadership skills. She also recently joined the board of the Women's Refugee Commission, which is dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls who have been forced to flee their homes.