After 40 years in finance, Harford is now learning to play golf and mahjong, and spending more time with family and friends.
In March 2024,
Before she began her career in finance, Harford worked as an actuary for an insurance company after she graduated from Denison University with a degree in physics and math. "I absolutely hated it," she said.
She decided to go to business school and got into the MBA program at The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. "I would have told you then that I had no interest in finance. And then I discovered through business school and friends what Wall Street was about and about sales, trading and markets. And I was fortunate enough to get a job in investment banking at Merrill Lynch and I never looked back," she recalled.
Harford joined Merrill in 1988 and said the environment was much rougher than it is today. "We'd do deals on the trading floor and get pricing from these mean old traders who would yell at you, but that's where the excitement was for me. I was never the cubicle type," she said.
She left Merrill in 1993 to work for Salomon Brothers in its fixed income capital markets division. In 1997, Travelers Group acquired Salomon, and one year later Travelers merged with Citicorp to form Citigroup.
Over the course of her 25-year tenure at Citi, Harford, a longtime
As she was approaching her ninth year as the regional head of markets, Harford began toying with the idea of retiring. "I loved that job and thought it would be kind of a nice way to go out," she said. But in 2017, UBS came calling to run its investments business. She was intrigued because the bank was offering a role that was unique to her. "I'd been on the sales side in investment banking, but I had never been on the buy side. So I thought, 'OK, this could be interesting,'" she said.
Harford spent her first two years at UBS as the head of investments for its assets management division and was approached by CEO Sergio Ermotti to head the entire asset management business. "The asset management team feel like they have a real calling, and there's tremendous pride in representing and working for the pension funds for teachers, firemen and policemen. They take their role very, very seriously," she said.
Harford's biggest challenge
For Harford, the 2008-2009 global financial crisis represented the biggest threat to her business and career. "At the time, we thought it was the end of the world. I think for anybody that was in a management role anywhere on Wall Street, it was really hard," she said.
During that time, Harford said that at Citi, "basically our senior management all left the firm, and it was a huge challenge from that perspective." However, she added, the experience taught her how much culture matters. "At the time, Wall Street had a fairly mercenary culture, a lot of ego and people putting themselves first was more common than not. And at Citi we discovered very early on that if we wanted to survive, we had to all work together."
What has changed for women in the industry
When Harford began her career in finance, she said the presumption was that once you became a mother, you would leave the industry. "I was the first woman to come back to work after I had my first child. And then my second, and I was the first to come back after my third child. But now that's the norm," she said. (Her two daughters, now adults, work in public relations and marketing, and her son, who is a junior in college, is attending a private equity boot camp this summer.)
And in terms of moving up the ranks, it used to be that "whoever produced the most got promoted, and the fact they were not a good manager didn't matter," she recalled. Today, she said there is a "greater appreciation for the softer skills and negotiation skills that women typically bring to the table."
Harford also said banks are more aware of the need to recruit people from diverse backgrounds: "There is no question in my mind — and I think most people's minds — the more diverse that pool of talent you hire, the better you're going to perform."
She cites an example when Citi's data and tech teams were looking to recruit more women and discovered that University of Texas, Austin, had more female mathematical engineering graduates than any other university in the country. So Citi started recruiting at the school.
Advice to anyone starting out in finance
"I would give the same advice I've been giving probably for 40 years, which is that this industry is so incredible. And it's vast and that means there's a job for every skill set and every interest," she said.
She advises new employees to identify the five things they are good at doing and hopefully two or three of those will intersect with their job. "It's a really hard career. It's a lot of time and energy, and [it comes at] the exclusion of other things at different points in your career. So you really better like what you do and who you do it with," she said.
Post-work life
Harford is enjoying new hobbies like golf and mahjong and has started running again. And she's also catching up on her leisure reading, which is bringing her a lot of joy.
"Honestly, it's amazing how much I'm available for stuff that I never even would have been considered for or never would have been asked to do, or I never would have been able to say 'yes,' such as visiting a friend, attending a wedding, attending a funeral or taking a weekend off," she said.
But her retirement won't be all fun and games. As of April 1, she is the board
She also recently joined the Capital One corporate board, just as the company is headed into
"But that's it. I think that's going to satisfy me until I settle in for a while. People are being very gracious and asking me what I want to do and what might be of interest to me, but I've got a to-do list, and it's awfully long."
