The Most Powerful Women in Finance: No. 13, Katy Knox, Bank of America

When Katy Knox became president of Bank of America Private Bank in 2018, she saw a need for staffing to become younger, more female and more representative of the people of color in its markets.

"We had an older workforce; our representation wasn't really where we wanted it," she said.

In the last five years, the number of women in the private bank's workforce has increased by more than 10%, as has the number of people of color. That's due largely to an increase in diversity among the 300 or so newly hired associates and analysts over that period of time.

Overall, Knox leads more than 4,500 professionals at Bank of America Private Bank, which generates $3.6 billion in annual revenue and has $640 billion in client balances from high-net-worth individuals, families and institutions.

The private bank has expanded into 15 new markets during her tenure. It has also hired 250 new private client advisors over the last five years to reach 550, and it's on track to reach nearly 600 by the end of the year, Knox said. The bank had 90 summer interns this year, compared to about 20 in 2018.

Besides providing a better reflection of the community, recruiting more women into the workforce is supported by client data. Women tend to be younger than their male partners, and they usually live longer. Also, women make 85% of the purchasing decisions and most of the charitable giving decisions in the household, Knox said, but data shows that they don't feel empowered to act independently and often don't feel heard or seen by traditional wealth management providers.

"We've been gathering a lot of data around our approach, and we feel it should be personalized to the individual versus the patriarch in the family," Knox said. "It was a big imperative for us to make sure we had a steady flow of female advisors coming into the bank."

Focus group research showed that there was an opportunity to reach out to women across the wealth spectrum who wanted and needed more of a voice in managing their wealth. "A lot of times, women are underserved. We have tried to build a program to build confidence and empower women to manage their wealth and really recognize them as individuals," she said.

To build the private bank's business, Knox has drawn on her experience in working in four of the other seven lines of business at Bank of America. Leading the retail practice of the consumer bank helped her understand technology deployed at scale. Working with small-business owners as customers in business banking and corporate executives in the commercial banking line taught her about how various types of companies operate, along with building relationships in those businesses, she said.

Her work throughout the bank helps her in working with the other business lines on client referrals for Bank of America Private Bank and expanding into the company's other markets, she said.

"It was a good opportunity for me to be honest about how things work and what we could do differently as the bank and the company evolved," Knox said. "When you walk in somebody's shoes a lot of times, it's just easier to work with them because you really know how things work."