Marianne Lake
Chief Financial Officer, JPMorgan Chase
In the style of her boss, Jamie Dimon, Marianne Lake has a reputation as a rapid-fire talker with a solid command of the numbers driving performance at JPMorgan Chase. This summer, with JPMorgan still in the hot seat over a spate of regulatory issues, it was Lake who did most of the talking on the company's second-quarter earnings call, which immediately inspired talk about her potential as a Dimon successor.
Appointed chief financial officer in November, Lake has held finance posts in the company's corporate, investment and retail arms, accumulating what Dimon has described as "an impressive breadth of knowledge and experience" fit for her "critically important role." Lake was CFO for the consumer and community banking unit until her latest promotion, which she described in an interview with Marie Claire magazine this spring as "the role on my list." She also talked about relying on friends and a nanny while in a job that doesn't always allow her to meet her goal of spending an hour a day with her young son, telling the magazine, "I try to try to make that work, but if I can't, I just move on. You can't beat yourself up about it."
