The Most Powerful Women in Finance

Published October 1, 2026 7:05 AM

2 Min Read

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Waiting for certainty is its own strategic risk. Geopolitics can move markets overnight, AI is challenging established competitive advantages, new business models are being developed, and the infrastructure of investing is changing—all requiring leaders to act as things happen.

The Most Powerful Women in Finance leaders stood out in 2025 and into 2026 because they were willing to act before their path forward was clear. They understood that economic shocks, changing interest-rate dynamics and market volatility required greater resilience and optionality. They were willing to reallocate capital, challenge long-held portfolio assumptions and move their teams forward.

At the same time, they recognized that AI, private markets, tokenization and changing market infrastructure were not isolated technology trends. They were altering where competitive advantage and economic value could accrue. The best leaders looked beyond incremental efficiency to fundamental questions about where their firms needed to differentiate, what capabilities they needed to own, and where product development and innovation could provide greater speed or scale.

They also understood the tension between moving faster and managing new forms of risk. They pushed experimentation with AI, new products and emerging infrastructure while strengthening governance, liquidity management, cybersecurity and operational resilience.

Leading through the uncertainty were executives like JPMorganChase's Mary Callahan Erdoes, CEO, asset and wealth management, ranked #1 for the fourth consecutive year on the Finance list. She is joined by Fidelity Investments CEO Abigail Johnson (#2), Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson (#3), Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman (#4), TIAA President and CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett (#5) and 20 other women who were able to distinguish cyclical disruption from structural change. They protected their businesses against immediate volatility without allowing short-term uncertainty to delay investments necessary for the next market structure.

Their defining capability was adaptability with conviction: the willingness to make critical decisions and lead the organization with agility to change as markets, technology and competition evolved.

Read the other rankings:

The Most Powerful Women in Banking

The Most Powerful Women in Banking's Women to Watch

The Most Powerful Women in Banking Top Teams

The Most Powerful Women in Banking NEXT

Mary Callahan Erdoes, JPMorganChase

CEO, Asset & Wealth Management

When Spain defeated Argentina in soccer's World Cup finals this summer, there was one fan in the stands of New Jersey's MetLife Stadium whose vision extended far beyond the match itself.

That would be Mary Callahan Erdoes, CEO of asset and wealth management at JPMorganChase, who steered $7 trillion in client assets and generated $24 billion in revenue last year.

To her, the moment reinforced her notion of the "Summer of Capital," in which three distinct themes have been energizing investment dollars—space, superintelligence and sports.

Abigail Johnson, Fidelity Investments

CEO

Looking across the breadth and depth of Fidelity Investments, it's hard to deny that CEO Abigail Johnson has her firm firing on all cylinders.

In 2025, the investment firm's brokerage retained the top spot based on self-directed customer assets, was the leading IRA provider, and was the No. 1 proprietary separately managed account distributor, according to Fidelity's annual report. Revenue and earnings for the year all came in at double-digit increases.

"Our investments in technology fuel our growth and service," Johnson said in the annual report. "We prioritize initiatives that advance digital capabilities, simplify our ecosystem, and protect customers and the firm." Johnson declined to be interviewed by American Banker for this profile.

Jenny Johnson, Franklin Templeton

CEO

This summer, asset manager Franklin Templeton bought a crypto investment team and said it would make part of the purchase with digital tokens the firm mints itself.

The purchase puts Franklin Templeton "among a small group of global asset managers with a dedicated, institutional-grade crypto investment management team," Jenny Johnson, the firm's CEO, said in an April 1 press release announcing the agreement.

Johnson joined the firm in 1988, more than three decades before she became chief executive of a company her grandfather founded. It managed $1.79 trillion at the end of June.

Learn more about Johnson's leadership.

Adena Friedman, Nasdaq

Chair and CEO

You can't blame Adena Friedman for sounding upbeat. She's made some big strategic bets since being named CEO of Nasdaq in 2017 and they appear to be paying off in spades.

Once a business that relied on cyclical, commoditized exchange revenue, Nasdaq has transformed under Friedman's leadership into a technology company on the leading edge of tokenization, AI deployment and helping banks fight financial crime. Fully 77% of the company's revenues now are recurring.

She's done that while continuing to grow an exchange business that is the largest in the world by volume and is winning key mandates, including the landmark $86 billion listing of Elon Musk's SpaceX, the largest IPO in history, in June.

Learn more about Friedman's 2025 performance.

Thasunda Brown Duckett, TIAA

President and CEO

For Thasunda Brown Duckett, president and CEO of asset manager TIAA, saving for retirement is personal—and it's for everyone. She's spoken publicly about how better financial literacy would have been a game changer for her own family and why all Americans need it.

Duckett has pushed TIAA to expand past workplace and personal retirement investments for teachers and higher-education employees, aiming to serve everyone who's headed toward the end of their careers. In particular, the firm is angling to get more of these investors to buy annuities, what it dubs "guaranteed lifetime income," within their plans.

Penny Pennington, Edward Jones

Managing Partner

The century-old investment firm Edward Jones is expanding into banking with new customer checking accounts, credit cards and lending options—just don't ask Penny Pennington if her ambition is to join the ranks of the bulge bracket.

When asked if that's her plan, Pennington, who leads 55,000 Edward Jones employees as the company's managing director, said she never quite understood its meaning. (It comes from when financial deals were published in "tombstone" advertisements that listed leading banks in larger and bolder font that bulged out at the reader).

"I don't want Edward Jones to be defined by any of those terms," Pennington said in an interview. "I want us to be defined by our clients as the place that they go to improve their financial fulfillment."

Yie-Hsin Hung, State Street Investment Management

President and CEO

With a wave of new products, record assets and a brand overhaul, the State Street Investment Management president and CEO is reshaping how the firm competes.

For Yie-Hsin Hung, president and CEO of State Street Investment Management, 2025 was one for the record books. AUM climbed to a record $5.7 trillion. The firm's gold ETFs and low-cost U.S. ETFs took in $31 billion and $62 billion, respectively—both all-time highs—and the investment arm rolled out 134 new products.

"Market conditions created demand in areas where we have long-standing leadership, but our 2025 performance was not simply a market-lift story," Hung said.

Kim Posnett, Goldman Sachs

Global Co-Head of Investment Banking

Kim Posnett is not one for wasting time. The global co-head of investment banking joined Goldman Sachs fresh out of graduate school in 2005, rose to managing director seven years later, and was promoted to her current role at the start of 2025, where she now drives the growth and overall strategy of the $1.8 trillion firm's investment bank. She is also a member of Goldman's management committee and vice chair of the firmwide client franchise committee, which oversees relationships between the firm and its global clients.

Since taking on the new role last year, Posnett is off to a strong start. Investment banking fees increased 21% year over year to $9.34 billion in 2025, primarily due to higher net revenues in advisory, which, in turn, reflect a significant increase in mergers and acquisitions. The firm advised on more than $1.6 trillion of announced M&A transaction volume. Those impressive results continued into 2026. In the first quarter, investment banking fees were $2.84 billion, 48% higher than the first quarter of 2025. Advisory revenues of $1.49 billion were up 89% year over year.

Anu Aiyengar, J.P. Morgan

Global Head of Advisory and M&A

For much of her 27-year career, Anu Aiyengar has operated more as a strategic counselor than a traditional dealmaker. So when J.P. Morgan elevated Aiyengar to global chair of investment banking and M&A in May, it didn't change how she works, it simply made her style of dealmaking official.

"My job is to be the person who is in the boardroom, be the person who is the confidant of the CEO, and help them navigate this complex world and achieve their strategy," she said. "It's a little bit reversed from 'I am selling the M&A product' to 'I am your consigliere.'"

Lindsay Hans, Bank of America, Merrill Wealth Management

President, Co-Head of Merrill Wealth Management

Lindsay Hans has overseen impressive growth as president and co-head of Merrill Wealth Management. Revenue was up 9% year over year to $20.7 billion in 2025, while client balances grew 12% to about $4 trillion.

But even more important is the work she does behind the scenes to ensure the growth is sustainable. Hans, in partnership with Merrill co-head Eric Schimpf, has been burnishing the company's training programs for new and established advisors. She also has been rolling out new tools designed to boost their efficiency and connecting them with business bankers to enhance sales opportunities.

Learn more about Hans' 2025 performance.

Katy Knox, Bank of America

President of Bank of America Private Bank

As the financial services industry gears up for an estimated $124 trillion intergenerational wealth transfer over the next two decades, Bank of America Private Bank President Katy Knox is preparing the firm's wealth business to compete for the next generation of clients.

Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z are set to inherit roughly $106 trillion of those assets, according to research by Cerulli Associates. For Knox, who leads an approximately 4,800-person division managing $757 billion in client balances, preparing for that turnover has meant rethinking how a major wealth management franchise best uses talent and advisory capabilities.

Learn more about Knox's leadership.

Martina Cheung, S&P Global

President and CEO

When information is the lifeblood of your company, you can't afford to sleep on the risks posed by artificial intelligence. Nor can you afford to overlook the opportunities.

Martina Cheung has never been one to be caught napping. As president and CEO of financial intelligence company S&P Global since November 2024, she has been leading the company's efforts to incorporate AI throughout the business and to expand the kinds of data S&P provides.

"Ultimately, the strategy is about scaling what we do best — trusted data, benchmarks and insights — while expanding into new opportunities where our capabilities are highly relevant," Cheung said. "That combination of core strength and adjacency growth is what I believe positions us for long-term, sustainable value creation."

Anna Marrs, American Express

Group President, Global Merchant & Network Services

As banks and payment companies battle for position in the new world of agentic commerce, Anna Marrs is among the leaders who will forge American Express' path.

"It's less about tech and more about trust," Marrs, group president of global merchant and network services at Amex, told American Banker. "Our card members need to trust the agent and the merchants need to know the transaction will work."

GMNS generated $4.9 billion in pretax segment income in 2025. Marrs has helped expand Amex's global merchant network to more than 170 million locations and the number of acceptance locations 500% since 2017.

Emily Portney, BNY

Global Head of Asset Servicing

The best measure of Emily Portney's success is the massive business's record revenue growth, 9% higher in 2025 over 2024, itself a record year.

Pretax income last year was even more impressive at $7.1 billion, up 21% year over year, with Q1 2026 generating $2 billion in pretax income compared to $1.5 billion last year, up 32%.

Asset servicing, BNY's largest business, has been particularly adept at implementing the commercial model strategy, previously referred to as One BNY. Launched by CEO Robin Vince in mid-2024, it presents an integrated global platform to customers. More than half its sales provide wins to other BNY businesses.

Learn more about Portney's 2025 performance.

Michal Katz, Mizuho Americas

Head of Investment and Corporate Banking

When Michal Katz joined Mizuho in late 2019, the bank ranked No. 24 in global investment banking league tables. It now sits at No. 11. One more rung and Mizuho breaks into the top 10, a publicly stated goal of its senior leadership and something that Katz has made the organizing principle of everything her division does.

"Fiscal 2026 is all about execution," she said. "How do we come in and provide our clients with a solution?"

The focus on execution comes after a couple of years of building a platform that the bank can deploy effectively worldwide. It was the 2023 acquisition of Greenhill, the boutique M&A and restructuring firm, which added a global footprint to Mizuho's existing lending and capital markets strengths. "From a product or solution perspective, the Greenhill acquisition has been an absolute home run," Katz said. But the real test of any acquisition is not what it adds on paper. It is what it enables in practice. For Katz, the answer runs through Tokyo.

Lynn Martin, NYSE Group

President

Observers of how Wall Street is adopting digital assets and payment rails would likely agree that some of the slowest uptake has come from stock markets.

But even this traditional corner of the market is coming around. Tokenized equities, stocks that are traded, settled and recorded on blockchain, have emerged in the past year as a competitive new market pitting upstarts such as Ondo Finance and Securitize against TradFi behemoths like the New York Stock Exchange.

"The way we tend to think about markets is where the trends are moving, but then how can we play an important role in guiding those trends in a responsible manner?" said Lynn Martin, president of NYSE Group, a unit of Intercontinental Exchange. "That's definitely been the case when it comes to the topic of digitization."

Donna Milrod, State Street

EVP, Chief Product Officer

For Donna Milrod, chief product officer at State Street, good product development starts with discipline and taking a look at the bigger picture. With myriad competing priorities, she believes success boils down to creating things that work for a broader market rather than just a single request.

"Our clients are the true north," Milrod said. "You have to listen to them, but innovation isn't only about creating custom capabilities."

That restrained philosophy has underpinned a year in which she has overseen initiatives spanning development in exchange-traded funds, digital assets, private markets and geographic expansion.

Learn more about Milrod's accomplishments in 2025.

Lisa Shalett, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management

Chief Investment Officer & Head of Global Investment Office

Lisa Shalett took a circuitous route to the position of chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.

"I didn't come to Wall Street thinking I'm going to be a chief investment officer," Shalett told American Banker. "My career has always been about trying to excel in the position that I'm in at the minute and seeing what doors that opens for me."

She started her career at the Boston Consulting Group, then spent 12 years at Sanford Bernstein as a sell-side analyst, a director of research and then CEO of the brokerage business at Sanford Bernstein. Then she ran global growth equities at AllianceBernstein.

Ann Fogarty, State Street

COO of Investment Services and Head of Global Delivery

Ann Fogarty, State Street's chief operating officer of investment services, wants to rewrite the narrative around banking operations. (In September, Fogarty was elevated to enterprise COO.)

Far from being a "back office" function, she argues her department sits at the center of State Street's efforts to scale, as the bank expands its products, technology and global footprint.

Fogarty joined State Street in 2021 from BNY Mellon, where she'd spent over three decades. Her mandate covers custody, accounting, fund administration, middle office and alternatives; businesses that account for more than 80% of State Street's consolidated revenue and client assets under custody and administration, according to the bank.

"In our business, the back office is the front office because that's the service," she said.

Racquel Oden, HSBC

U.S. Head of International Wealth & Global Private Banking

By the end of geopolitically and financially volatile 2025, Racquel Oden's international wealth and global private banking division saw total assets reach $39.9 billion and revenue climb 7%, to $983 million. Oden attributes the success to HSBC's emphasis on comprehensive financial planning that often includes multiple plans, whether to finance a second home, a child's education, retirement, a new business or something else.

"Planning is at the core of every client interaction and has been a massive game changer for us," said Oden, IWPB's chief for nearly three years and previously the head of JPMorgan's consumer bank network expansion. "From there we can look at how their investments work toward those plans."

Learn more about Oden's leadership.

Kate El-Hillow, Russell Investments

President and CIO

Kate El-Hillow made a strategic move in 2025 at Russell Investments that might cause some people to scratch their heads.

El-Hillow, president and chief investment officer at the asset manager, brought technology under her leadership and merged the tech team with the investment team. Why?

"Technology is no longer supporting the investment process. It is part of the investment process," she said.

By bringing those capabilities under one umbrella, portfolio managers, researchers, data scientists and engineers now work side-by-side, enabling the firm to create, test and launch innovations more quickly. Today, the investment-tech team is collaborating on how the firm is using AI.

Kourtney Gibson, TIAA

CEO, Retirement Solutions

Kourtney Gibson wants to change the way Americans approach retirement. And as the CEO of retirement solutions at TIAA, she knew that change had to start from within.

"We really spent 2025 working on culture, motivating our people to continue to excel and breaking down silos to drive transformative changes," said Gibson, whose team generated nearly 70% of TIAA's total enterprise revenue in 2025. "When you're a 100-year-old organization with wonderful frameworks, you still have to ask: What are we doing today that's going to change our trajectory?"

For Gibson, who joined the company in 2022 and was named CEO of retirement solutions in the fall of 2024, that meant doubling down on what was already working—largely the company's annuity-embedded target-date solutions, TIAA RetirePlus. The default product provides lifetime income to participants in a target-date structure, and is becoming increasingly popular as Americans live longer and fret more about financial survival.

Learn more about Gibson's 2025 performance.

Solita Marcelli, UBS

Global Head of Investment Management, UBS Global Wealth Management

Solita Marcelli took on the job of managing and growing one of the world's largest pools of assets in April 2025 and spent what her team calculated as more than 3,000 hours on the road in the year that followed—Singapore one week, São Paulo the next, Istanbul after that. Travel is central to how she leads UBS global wealth management.

"My instinct has always been to begin by understanding the local context before trying to apply global solutions," she said. "Markets have different histories, clients have different relationships with risk and trust is built differently in different cultures."

Marcelli oversees a team of 800 and $2.5 trillion in assets in her role as global head of investment management, a position created in 2025 when UBS unified its four regional investment teams under a single leader. The results over the past 18 months are tangible. UBS Manage, the firm's flagship discretionary platform outside the U.S., delivered 100% growth in net new inflows, driven in part by My Way, a modular investment offering what Marcelli says is like "Lego pieces" for portfolio construction, letting clients and advisors test portfolio construction in real time.

Sharon Yeshaya, Morgan Stanley

EVP and CFO

As EVP and CFO of Morgan Stanley, Sharon Yeshaya oversees the financial stewardship of one of the world's largest financial institutions, with a balance sheet of more than $1 trillion and client assets in excess of $9 trillion. She rose to the position five years ago under CEO James Gorman and has continued under the leadership of Ted Pick, who succeeded Gorman in 2024—never missing a beat during the changing of the guard.

Given her results as CFO, it's clear why she's remained in the role under two CEOs. For the full-year 2025, Morgan Stanley delivered record net revenues of $70.6 billion and net income of $16.9 billion, with strong results across business segments. Return on equity was 16.6%. Moving into 2026, the company reported record quarterly net revenues of $20.6 billion and pretax income of $7.0 billion. All this amid geopolitical uncertainty, regulatory change and shifting policy environments.

Allison Dukes, Invesco

CFO

Allison Dukes' career took an unexpected turn in 2009.

After climbing the ranks as an investment banker with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, she became a managing director, overseeing originations for syndicated finance. Then the financial crisis hit.

SunTrust survived the collapse of the subprime mortgage bubble, but its exposure to the Florida housing market left it deeply wounded. To remain viable it had to overhaul its balance sheet and needed someone to spearhead that effort.

"I raised my hand," Dukes told American Banker. "And, honestly, people thought I was a little crazy."