Most Powerful Women in Banking | Top Teams: TD Bank

October 6, 2021 12:00 AM

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.

As part of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance program, we have selected five "Top Teams" for 2021. TD Bank is one of the team honorees.

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To see the evaluation criteria for the Top Teams category, please scroll to the end.

TD Bank
Headquarters: Cherry Hill, N.J.
Assets: $415.5 billion
Female representation among corporate officers: 29%
Female representation on operating committee: 30%

Diversity initiatives

To increase diversity in its senior ranks, TD launched a “returnship” program in January 2020 to recruit experienced women who took an intentional break from work and get them back on the career track by refreshing their skills. The six-month Career Relaunch program, led by Sarah Cole and Laura Picone, provides job-specific training, networking with senior management and other resources to help the recruits successfully navigate the transition. Each one is paired with a mentor who was a “relauncher” herself. Seven of the nine participants in the first two cohorts have converted to permanent positions. Plans are underway to scale the program enterprisewide.

Another program, Take the L.E.A.D. (short for leadership, engagement, achievement, development), now in its third year, is aimed at developing and advancing women in TD’s commercial bank. It is a yearlong program that includes monthly one-on-one mentoring and group sessions with executives. This year each mentee is being partnered with a male ally for additional guidance and expanded visibility.

The L.E.A.D. program was founded by Rachel Wilner, Emily Stoddard, and Molly Abair, who wanted to help women build the leadership skills needed for executive roles.

Selected executive highlights:

Janice Withers

Chief Information Officer

Having executed pandemic measures such as the shift to work-from-home and the rollout of the digital application for the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program with speed that previously would have been thought impossible, Withers’s team is now sharing what it learned from the experience across the company. It developed a “tool kit” to help other teams assess their own speed and agility and gain from the strategies the technology team used to deliver results in record time without bureaucracy. Despite the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic and the work it entailed, including implementing technology such as Virtual Queue and Curbside Pickup, the Withers team also managed to achieve established goals for the year, delivering new Salesforce and nCino capabilities to small-business banking teams and completing a multiyear effort to build a risk and regulatory data warehouse.

Sheryl McQuade

Regional President for Northern New England

When TD hired McQuade to head the Northern New England region, encompassing Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, she became the first female regional president in the company’s history. She provides strategic direction and sales leadership for retail, small business, commercial and middle-market banking, in a region with 112 branches and 922 employees. She was instrumental in helping execute Paycheck Protection Program efforts, which provided more than 9,100 loans to businesses in her region. She also led Community Reinvestment Act efforts to support organizations helping underserved populations disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. When competitors opted to avoid risk by tightening affordable housing lending as the pandemic spurred a rental crisis, her team funded 62 loans for $292 million to support affordable housing, low- and moderate-income community services and economic development. She also led a retail strategy that provided help navigating digital channels for customers who couldn't visit branches.

Jo Jagadish

Head of Corporate Products and Services

Jagadish manages all products offered in the commercial bank, whether for deposits, treasury and cash management, commercial cards, or trade finance. So she facilitates significant contributions to TD’s net interest income and fee income.

She is also responsible for digital products, client servicing, implementation, revenue management and product sales support functions for the commercial bank.

Jagadish is leading the digital and open banking platform strategy for the commercial bank and, as such, plays a role in directing the TD’s digital investments. Those investments proved especially valuable after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, allowing the bank to create a digital application for the Paycheck Protection Program in less than 48 hours and later a digital forgiveness application for those loans. The technology investments also led to the creation of digital self-service tools, online account opening and electronic payment capabilities that allowed business people to continue operations when forced to work remotely.

One of the investments Jagadish led is TD’s Series B funding of the fintech Autobooks, which provides the bank’s commercial clients with the ability to send invoices, accept payments and manage accounting through the same portal they use for online banking.

Lisa Ainsworth

Credit Analyst, Commercial Real Estate Lending

Ainsworth was in the first cohort of women participating in the new Career Relaunch program. She had left her 15-year career in finance nearly two decades ago to become a stay-at-home mother and later took a job as a high school social studies teacher. “I enjoyed teaching, but missed finance,” said Ainsworth, who heard about the TD program from a friend. “I missed the camaraderie and risk and all the things you do in the financial world.”

Ainsworth said that, during the program and afterward, many TD women provided moral support, which she needed as “a woman returning to corporate life in her late 50s,” and that this built her confidence and made her “feel like I had a home.” Executives also saw that she had worked in risk and offered her an analyst role. “Where was this career path 30 years ago?” she said, noting that she had previously worked in the heavily male-dominated area of municipal bonds trading. “I like that I can bring my whole self to work and that other people appreciate that,” she added.

The team

Molly Abair, Lisa Ainsworth, Sarah Cole, Rebecca Frisch, Ellen Glaessner, Jo Jagadish, Suzanne Kliegerman, Sheryl McQuade, Anita O’Dell , Laura Picone, Julie Pukas, Kellee Rivers, Emily Stoddard, Marla Willner, Rachel Wilner, Janice Withers, Jennifer Young

TD Bank also received a top team award in 2018.

See the other 2021 Top Teams:

What it takes

In the Top Teams category, each bank is evaluated based on:

The presence and influence of women in the senior ranks
The performance of women-led business units
Demonstrated commitment to and progress toward fostering diversity (and specifically female participation) in senior leadership and key roles with P&L responsibility
Improvements shown in the representation of women in the pipeline
Programs, policies and practices that are effective in fostering success in the areas above