Jennifer Steans
Ceo, Financial Investments Corp.
Jennifer Steans spent her first two years out of college as a high school math teacher and later was a consultant at Deloitte & Touche, concentrating on the finance and health care sectors. But being the daughter of prominent Chicago banker Harrison Steans, she soon was attracted to the opportunity to get into the family business.
In 1994 she and her father co-founded Financial Investments Corp. to handle the family's substantial fortune and to explore bank investment opportunities that led to ownership stakes in both the $2.7 billion-asset USAmeriBank in Florida and the $5.9 billion-asset Cole Taylor Bank in Chicago.
The Cole Taylor purchase put the Steans family back in familiar territory. (The elder Steans was chairman of the former LaSalle Bank, now part of Bank of America). Jennifer Steans, who majored in math at Davidson College and has an MBA from Northwestern, now sits on the boards of both USAmeriBank and Cole Taylor. In July, MB Financial announced a merger with Cole Taylor's holding company. Steans will serve on the MB board.
Steans' nonprofit work includes a seat on the board of the Chicago Foundation for Women, and she is a past chair of Leadership Greater Chicago, a program to develop civic leaders from diverse backgrounds.
