The 25 Most Powerful Women in Finance: 16-20

16. Suni Harford
Managing Director, Regional Head Of North American Markets, Citigroup

Last year, Citigroup's Suni Harford lived out of a suitcase visiting clients and account teams across the globe to bring them up to date on the stabilizing performance of the North American markets group. This year, Harford spent a lot of her time buried in red tape.

Harford was in charge of coordinating compliance for her group (a $6.5 billion-revenue division last year) and she spearheaded lobbying and regulatory outreach on Dodd-Frank Act rules, the JOBS Act and derivatives reform, among other things. The burdens of implementing and complying with the new rules forced Harford to institute wholesale changes to expense filing and procurement processes-everything from paper clips to IT service contracts," she says.

While cost-cutting was a priority, so was one of Harford's passions: finding opportunities for military veterans. She leads Citi's efforts to recruit veterans (more than 1,000 hired since January 2011) and was the driving force behind Citi's membership in Veterans on Wall Street, a program to raise awareness on the transition challenges faced by returning service personnel. She also took a co-head role for CitiWomen, the company's initiative to promote gender diversity.

17. Diane Schumaker-Krieg
Global Head Of Research & Economics, Wells Fargo Securities

"Research is seeing what everyone else has seen but thinking what no one else has thought."

Diane Schumaker-Krieg didn't say this, though she admires the 1937 Nobel Prize winning scientist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, who did. She applies this to her job at Wells Fargo Securities, by making it a priority to think differently. Having already encouraged collaborative research from debt and equity analysts to assess stocks from disparate viewpoints, Schumaker-Krieg in the past year expanded her group's target readership beyond brokerage clients to sell its intelligence to Wells Fargo clients in other areas such as corporate banking.

She also entered the municipal bond research space, recruiting high profile analyst Natalie Cohen. At a time when big-name analysts like Meredith Whitney were ominously forecasting a muni bond meltdown, Cohen took the opposite tack-and munis ended 2011 as one of the top performing asset classes.

18. Maria Elena Lagomasino
CEO, Genspring Family Offices

Maria Elena Lagomasino's support of a universal fiduciary standard for broker-dealers has her marching against many in the securities industry.

But for someone who left a position heading JPMorgan Chase's private banking unit over concerns that major firms were placing proprietary investment product sales ahead of client interests, it's not surprising. She also is a founding member of the Institute for the Fiduciary Standard, a think tank promoting investor-first fiduciary standards in financial advice.

Lagomasino has been at SunTrust-affiliated GenSpring for seven years, and oversees more than $20 billion in assets under management. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and The Economic Club of New York, serves on the boards of Coca Cola, Avon and The Americas Society, and is a trustee of the National Geographic Society.