The Most Innovative People in Finance 2026

Published June 1, 2026 8:28 AM

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Updated June 1, 2026 11:16 AM

4 Min Read

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Banking has entered a new phase of transformation that has the potential to remake large swaths of the industry. For much of the past decade, innovation was often framed around modernization efforts such as upgrading legacy systems, improving digital channels, or experimenting with emerging technologies through pilots and limited deployments. Now, the institutions pulling ahead competitively are distinguished by their willingness to explore innovation early and their ability to operationalize it at scale and translate it into measurable business outcomes.

Across the industry, innovation is beginning to reshape the economics and competitive structure of financial services in more tangible ways. Revenue models are evolving. Operational costs are being reconfigured through the strategic integration of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and blockchain. That, in turn, is fundamentally changing how capital is allocated. Risk management is becoming more data driven, predictive and automated. Customer expectations around speed, personalization and accessibility continue to rise as the instant-everything culture takes hold.

What makes the current cycle particularly significant is that several major technology shifts are unfolding simultaneously and beginning to intersect. AI, real-time payments, digital assets, tokenization, cloud-native infrastructure, embedded finance, and programmable financial systems are increasingly reinforcing one another and revamping how financial institutions operate, deliver services and compete.

These factors compelled American Banker to launch The Most Innovative People in Finance, a new annual ranking that recognizes the top 50 individuals who are driving these massive waves of digital transformation—producing measurable results, shoring up their competitive positions, opening new markets, and, in some cases, redefining the industry.

Leading this year's list is #1-ranked Vantage Bank CEO Jeff Sinnott for the launch of the U.S.'s first bank-issued stablecoin; followed in the top five spots by Custodia Bank CEO Caitlin Long (#2) for the debut of a tokenized deposit network for community banks; Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti (#3) for developing and deploying the firm's widespread internal use cases for agentic AI; TD Bank SVP and Chief AI Scientist Maksims Volkovs (#4) for the development of its predictive foundation AI model; and Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley (#5) for becoming the issuer of Tether's U.S.-regulated stablecoin USA₮.

The methodology used to select the 50 individuals is based on quantitative and qualitative factors encompassing leadership, investment in technology innovation, and number, size and impact of digital transformation initiatives over a single year (2025) and three-year time horizon, including internal cost efficiency gains and/or new revenue generation, and, where applicable, impact on the industry. American Banker also considered the role that the individual played in driving digital transformation initiatives in 2025, percentage of technology budget allocated to new innovation projects, products and initiatives, specific funding amount allocated to digital transformation initiatives annually, acquisitions and partnerships initiated to advance the bank's innovation, impact on creating an internal culture of innovation, and number of patents held in their name.

Why does recognition of outstanding leadership in innovation matter now more than ever?

Consider that AI sits at the center of much of the transformative change—with advanced forms of AI increasingly coordinating workflows, monitoring transactions in real time, supporting liquidity management, identifying anomalous behavior, and assisting with operational decision-making across multiple functions simultaneously.

At the same time, the movement and representation of value itself is changing, with stablecoins, tokenized deposits, blockchain-based settlement systems, and digital-asset infrastructure evolving from experimentation into broader commercial use cases.

As such, real-time payment networks, richer transaction data standards, embedded financial services, and intelligent payment routing are transforming payments into a central layer of customer engagement and commercial activity.

Underpinning many of these developments is a broader modernization of banking infrastructure. Cloud-native architecture, API-driven platforms, and modular technology environments are driving adaptability, data accessibility, ecosystem connectivity, and the ability to integrate intelligence directly into operational workflows.

This period of structural change is altering the competitive dynamics of the industry, requiring leadership that understands when to invest, where to modernize, which risks are worth taking and how to aggressively reposition their institutions for the future.

The Most Innovative People of the Year honorees, as well as American Banker's Innovation of the Year 2026 honorees, will be celebrated at an invitation-only awards dinner held in conjunction with Digital Banking, June 15-17 in Orlando, FL.

Jeff Sinnott, President and CEO

Vantage Bank

When an international trucking company wanted to beat its competition for the industry's best drivers, it turned to its bank with a request: enable us to pay them the moment they pull into the warehouse. The bank came back with a two-pronged approach that uses geo-location to know the whereabouts of the semis and blockchain technology to make the instant payment. It worked as advertised and on top of that reduced the cross-border payment cost by 94 percent.

But this wasn't JPMorganChase helping FedEx; it was Vantage Bank of Texas, which has branches all over the state, and DX Express, a trucking company with rigs in Mexico and the U.S.

Caitlin Long, CEO

Custodia Bank

Stablecoins are widely seen as one of the first major digital-asset breakthroughs, yet the intersection of the fiat economy and blockchain is still fraught with inconsistencies and risk. One example: banks have to work with a custodian that holds specific securities certifications if they want to accept stablecoins as loan collateral, adding cost and complexity to the business.

Yet what if a stablecoin was structured to mimic an asset that banks trade with daily? That was the idea behind the Hazel Network and its stablecoin, Avit, that was built in part by Caitlin Long, founder and CEO of Custodia Bank.

"It's a digital cashier's check, which has the same legal structure as a paper cashier's check," Long, referring to Avit, said in an interview. "We're basically taking a legal structure that banks are very familiar with and comfortable with and porting it into a digital realm."

Marco Argenti, CIO

Goldman Sachs

The delivery was gentle, but Marco Argenti experienced a shock the first time he heard "no" from an artificial intelligence agent.

Still, he realized the value of having a colleague, albeit an artificial one, that could challenge his ideas and nudge him toward better ones. Just like a human colleague who raises questions, it helps to build trust, said Argenti, chief information officer at Goldman Sachs. "If they just accept everything you say, then it's hard to delegate."

Argenti, who holds five patents and is a member of the firm's management committee, is responsible for much of what the firm is delegating to AI. He enabled the firmwide access of the GS AI Assistant, Goldman's natural language conversational application that leverages the GS AI Platform and has on average more than 1 million prompts per month since it was implemented last July.

Learn more about Argenti's innovations.

Maksims Volkovs, SVP and Chief AI Scientist

TD Bank

Maksims Volkovs, senior vice president and chief AI scientist at TD Bank, and his team take a "pragmatic buy, build and blend approach" to developing AI tools — building in-house when they see a "data advantage," and leaning on off-the-shelf technology for speed and simplicity.

In the case of TD's new AI Prism predictive foundation model, Volkovs and his more than 130-member team develop the tool entirely in-house following three years of R&D.

Volkovs, who joined TD eight years ago, recently oversaw consolidation of myriad single-purpose predictive models into AI Prism to better anticipate customers' needs.

Learn more about Volkovs' work at TD.

Nathan McCauley, CEO

Anchorage Digital

It's not often you see an entire industry go through such a regulatory whipsaw as crypto has in the past year, from an administration bent on destroying it to one that now welcomes it as a national asset. No one knows this better than Nathan McCauley, Cofounder and CEO of Anchorage Digital Bank.

McCauley, who helped found Anchorage in 2017 and has over 700 people reporting to him, got the word in June 2023 that the startup's bank was closing its account in 30 days, a move that was "devastating" and led to a 20 percent workforce layoff at Anchorage, McCauley told the Senate Banking committee in testimony last year.

But that was then. Today, McCauley credits legislation and regulatory policies as the main catalyst for 2025 being an incredible year for financial adoption of blockchain technology.

Rushira Ghosh, Head of Customer Authentication

TD Bank U.S.

If you happened to be at Mt. Everest base camp last year, you might have noticed a rather important VIP in one of the tents: A bank executive hell-bent on making sure your money is safe—even at insane altitudes.

That executive would be Ruchira Ghosh, head of customer authentication (CIAM) for TD U.S. She's the one heading off fraud, staying one step ahead of criminal syndicates, and ensuring all customers are who they say they are. [Editor's note: After The Most Innovative People in Finance ranking was completed, Ghosh left her role at TD Bank.]

That's a high-stakes job, where any misstep could have huge consequences. Like, say, planting a foot wrong on Everest. So, it's no wonder that Ghosh thrives in one of the more challenging environments on the planet.

Learn more about Ghosh's work.

Donna Milrod, EVP, Chief Product Officer and Head of State Street Digital

State Street

While much of the financial services industry is planning around digital assets for the future, Donna Milrod is treating them as a reality driving business today. As executive vice president and chief product officer at State Street, she has spent the past three years turning what much of the industry was still piloting into live, institutional-grade infrastructure—and she is just getting started.

Appointed CPO in late 2022, Milrod oversees product development and management for approximately 80% of State Street's business, leading a team of some 600 professionals across investment servicing—including digital assets—and enterprise-wide digital transformation.

Lori Beer, Global CIO

JPMorganChase

To give you a sense of the size and scale of Lori Beer's responsibilities, here's a term you may not have heard before: "exabyte."

That's how much data Beer's team of more than 63,000 technologists oversees at JPMorganChase. That's a quintillion bytes—a one followed by 18 zeroes.

In more practical terms, that means stewarding the data of 86.6 million U.S. customers, and the $12 trillion in digital payments being processed daily. Making sure it all works seamlessly, with proper controls, risk management and cybersecurity, falls on Beer, the firm's CIO.

Anthony Noto, CEO

SoFi

If you're wondering whether Anthony Noto believes in the impossible, just look at the photo he kept on his desk for much of his career, which now hangs at his home.

It's of the 1980 U.S. Olympic men's hockey team, famed for toppling the formidable Soviets and taking home the gold medal against all odds. As sportscaster Al Michaels called the final moments: "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!"

Now, of course, the U.S. has just won Olympic gold again in hockey (both men's and women's teams). In Noto's career, that's exactly the kind of path he's looking to forge: What formerly seemed impossible is now highly possible.

Nikki Katz, Head of Digital

Bank of America

Nikki Katz calls 2025 "a big year of scale" for Bank of America, noting that 94% of Bank of America's total client interactions now happen digitally.

As head of digital since 2018, Katz oversees over 500 direct reports and digital experiences across mobile, online banking, and employee channels at the bank.

"We had a lot of capabilities, and we were able to put them together," Katz said in an interview. "We've been really focusing on shifting our sales operations to leverage digital more heavily, so we were able to go from 55% of our sales coming in through digital in 2024 to 66% in 2025."

Learn more about Katz's initiatives.

Carolyn Weinberg, Chief Product and Innovation Officer

BNY

Applied math is used to solve complex problems in areas ranging from astrophysics to econometrics and earning a B.A. in the discipline years ago from Harvard College instilled in Carolyn Weinberg the need to first define problems, then to use math tools innovatively to solve them.

She has taken that approach as chief product and innovation officer at two of the largest global financial-services firms—currently at BNY—as the industry undergoes fundamental changes to its technological and operational infrastructure.

"Innovation is very much about what do we have today, how do we make it best in class, and then how do we extend it to enable new use cases and solutions," she said.

Learn more about Weinberg's initiatives.

Hari Gopalkrishnan, Chief Technology and Information Officer

Bank of America

Hari Gopalkrishnan, who joined Bank of America's executive management team as chief technology and information officer in July 2025, runs all of the bank's technology with a singular focus: Scaling AI's power while maintaining human-like interactions.

Gopalkrishnan, who has been at Bank of America for 14 years, currently oversees tech for eight lines of business from consumer banking to wealth management. He manages a $14 billion annual budget and 60,000 employees who handle everything from software development to infrastructure.

His mandate has evolved from building digital foundations to embedding AI across client experiences and developer workflows, ensuring tools like Erica, Bank of America's flagship AI-driven virtual assistant, and GitHub Copilot deliver results without risks like hallucinations.

Learn more about Gopalkrishnan's work at BofA.

Gilles Gade, Founder, President and CEO

Cross River Bank

For CEO Gilles Gade, technological agility has allowed Cross River Bank to thrive in all market conditions, from the mortgage crisis, through COVID-19 and now the advent of AI.

"We built our core engine to be agile enough that it could adapt to any new rail that comes our way," he said. "We're [technology] agnostic, so interoperability is the key to unleashing our potential to constantly innovate."

Cross River's emphasis on flexibility came out of necessity. During its founding in 2008, the bank faced strong headwinds in deploying the capital it raised given the financial world's pullback from risk. Gilles moved Cross River into active participation with TALF, the Term Asset-backed Securities Loan Facility the Treasury implemented to jump-start the asset-backed securitization market. The move worked out: five quarters after its founding, Cross River turned its first profit.

Scott Ramon, Chief Technology Officer

NBKC Bank

Scott Ramon is a coder at heart. The CTO of $1.25 billion NBKC Bank in Kansas City manages a team of 18 software engineers charged, in part, with cutting out third-party vendors wherever possible. He also advises senior management on how technology can enhance customer experiences, drive efficiencies and achieve strategic objectives.

Even so, Ramon is not above assigning himself to "build jobs" where he's writing code. "I love the creative aspect of writing software," he says. "I'm a builder. It's what gives me energy."

Since arriving in 2018, Ramon has overseen the building of software solutions, customized to NBKC's needs, that he's confident are equal to any big bank offering. "We rarely say, 'We're just a community bank.' We look at what they're doing and say, 'Why don't we do that?'" he explains. "We always want to punch above our weight when it comes to innovation."

Dilip Venkatachari, SEVP and Chief Information and Technology Officer

U.S.Bank

Dilip Venkatachari has had a busy year, leading the modernization of U.S. Bank's technology foundation through cloud migration, application simplification, and increased architectural reuse. This has improved system performance, reliability, and release frequency, enabling faster delivery of new products and capabilities.

In parallel, the senior executive vice president and chief information and technology officer has driven increased automation and AI enablement across technology processes, embedding intelligence into development, operations, and reliability practices. These innovations have increased productivity, reduced operational complexity, and improved customer experience across digital channels.

Thomas Halpin, Head of North America Global Payments Solutions

HSBC

It shouldn't be lost on those working to make digital payments commonplace that there are still guys like Thomas Halpin around. Halpin, head of North America global payments solutions for HSBC, remembers when payments were mainly manual and paper based. As technology moved deeper into the space, the goal back then was just to make things faster.

Now Halpin is overseeing an near-instantaneous digital system developed by HSBC that allows payments initiated on a blockchain to be sent to anyone with a bank account. It's called HDSU and is basically a permissioned-blockchain framework that connects the digital rails that move cryptocurrency to the TradFi banking settlement system that handles dollars, euro and yen.

Learn more about Halpin's tech strategies.

Reetika Grewal, EVP, Head of Wholesale Digital and Enterprise Innovation

Wells Fargo

When Reetika Grewal took over as head of digital for Wells Fargo's commercial and corporate investment banking businesses, she set about reshaping how digital innovation happens inside the 174-year-old bank. Rather than building digital tools around individual banking products, she shifted to a client-centered innovation model designed to solve problems that align to how businesses operate.

The existing product-centered approach made sense to those who designed it, but to clients the result was a monolithic portal of 67 different applications, each with its own look and feel.

Matthew Parker-Jones, SVP, International Commercial Banking

Scotiabank

Matthew Parker-Jones is happy to be in banking at a time when many limits on creativity are falling away. The SVP for international commercial banking at Canadian giant Scotiabank marvels at the near-infinite amount of computing power offered by the cloud. The rich datasets, accessible in real-time, and the power of artificial intelligence and large language learning models to compress development timelines feel breathtaking.

"The compounding effect of those technologies is unlocking use cases that two years ago were completely unreachable," he says. "There's no more exciting place to be right now than banking. We're about to go through a seismic shift where change will happen exponentially."

Mathew Mehrotra, Group Head, Canadian Personal and Business Banking, and Co-Head Canadian Personal and Commercial Banking

BMO

When asked about the biggest challenge in leading innovation at BMO over the past year, Mathew (Mat) Mehrotra, group head of Canadian personal and business banking and co-head of Canadian personal and commercial banking, said something that may seem counterintuitive in the current environment: "The temptation to apply AI everywhere before the right enablers are in place to ensure success."

At a time when companies across multiple industries are enthusiastically investing billions in AI-enabled technology, Mehrotra calls for careful consideration of its best use cases before jumping in. The focus at BMO, he said, is to solve problems that most affect clients and then apply technology where it can make the biggest impact. "That means innovating to solve challenges for clients and our business while staying focused on execution excellence," he said.

Jennifer Barker, Global Head of Payments & Trade and Depositary Receipts

BNY

At the forefront of the increasingly complex web of payment options, BNY, under Jennifer Barker's guidance, has employed artificial intelligence, blockchain and the latest in conventional technology to ease institutional clients' burdens.

"What gets me out of bed every day is helping solve their problems, even those they may not know about yet, because we can see it in the data," said Barker, the global head of treasury services and depositary receipts, in an interview.

Those data-driven insights stem from the bank processing $2.5 trillion in payments daily and, as the top global depositary, providing custody for upwards of $500 billion of assets. It identifies opportunities based on a client's own data to address issues such as maximizing liquidity income or minimizing foreign-exchange costs. BNY's Client Insights platform launched two years ago under Barker's watch.

Sathish Muthukrishnan, Chief Information, Data & Digital Officer

Ally Financial

When he started at Ally Financial six years ago, Sathish Muthukrishnan said he was keenly focused on digital transformation. "Over the next few years, through the uncertainty of the global pandemic and banking crises, I guided a group of talented CIOs and experts in building a foundational triad that would support the business for years to come – a flexible cloud infrastructure, modernized network and centralized data," he said.

In his role as chief information, data and digital officer, Muthukrishnan is responsible for leading initiatives in cybersecurity, infrastructure, product, customer experience, data analytics, artificial intelligence and tech operations. [Editor's note: After his selection as one of The Most Innovative People in Finance, Muthukrishnan moved into a new role as Strategic Advisor at Ally.]

Learn more about Muthukrishnan's work.

Jeremy Rishel, Chief Technology Officer

SoFi

When 60% of SoFi's customers told the digital bank in a survey that they preferred to buy, sell and manage their crypto with a licensed bank rather than the digital-asset exchange they dealt with, Chief Technology Officer Jeremy Rishel paid attention.

Rishel, who joined SoFi almost four years ago, has helped oversee a transition at the nationally chartered bank toward digital assets and payment rails. The bank began allowing its customers to access the Bitcoin Lightning Network last year to make cross-border payments and joined a growing chorus of financial firms when it issued its own stablecoin in December.

Pam Habner, Head of U.S. Consumer Cards

Citi

Pam Habner has been keeping her fingers on the pulse of digital advancements in the credit card industry for almost 25 years. She did so at JPMorgan Chase and American Express for a combined 17 years before being hired in 2020 as Citi's head of U.S. consumer cards.

Reporting to Citi CEO Jane Fraser and serving on the executive management team, Habner focuses on operating and growing the company's branded and co-branded credit card portfolio, which generated over $18 billion in revenue in 2025 and serves more than 70 million customers.

These days, much of Habner's work relates to incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into Citi's credit card business.

Learn more about Habner's initiatives.

Umar Farooq, Global Co-Head of J.P. Morgan Payments

J.P. Morgan

A voracious reader in his spare time, Umar Farooq tends to focus on tomes describing the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, Panama Canal, and other massive engineering projects, or biographies of up-by-the-bootstrap leaders such as Henry Truman and Tim Cook.

They provide perspective on how to pursue complex, large-scale and impactful projects, as Farooq integrates distributed ledger technology across J.P. Morgan's payments platform. Starting in 2014, he led the bank's Blockchain Center of Excellence that ultimately became Kinexys by J.P. Morgan. The internal blockchain unit's breakthroughs have been integrated along the way into J.P. Morgan Payments, a department Farooq now co-heads that generates $20 billion in revenue, has more than 30,000 employees, and offers merchant and treasury services, trade and working capital, and other payment services across 160 countries and 120 currencies.

Laide Majiyagbe, Global Head of Liquidity, Financing, and Global Collateral

BNY

Over the past year, Laide Majiyagbe, global head of markets at BNY, has focused on a central question: what new possibilities can technology unlock in liquidity, collateral and short-term funding? Under her leadership, the bank has expanded into novel applications of distributed ledger technology, digital assets markets and tokenization.

A Nigerian-born engineer by training, Majiyagbe spent more than a decade in Goldman Sachs' liquidity business before moving to BNY. In the past five years at the bank, she has steadily expanded her responsibilities, overseeing the firm's collateral and liquidity financing operations, before being named global head of markets and a member of the executive committee earlier this year.

Paul Margarites, Managing Director & Head of Digital Channels

TD Bank

As head of commercial digital channels at TD, Paul Margarites constantly ponders digital innovations that could benefit the bank and how his 40-member team can make those innovations happen.

It's Margarites' job to drive digital transformations that help commercial, corporate and institutional customers interact with TD through its internet and mobile portals, APIs and embedded banking platforms. Armed with tech savvy from previous roles at JPMorganChase and PwC, Margarites joined TD in 2021. [Editors note: After his selection as one of The Most Innovative People in Finance, Margarites left TD.]

Soon after arriving at TD, Margarites, who holds two patents, took on an almost herculean task: unifying the U.S. commercial bank's digital operations. The three-year project involved folding siloed components of the bank's commercial channels organization into one organization. As a result, digital assets like secure document exchanges and live agent chats could be shared more broadly, Margarites said.

Michael Pizzi, Global Head of Technology & Operations

Morgan Stanley

When it comes to technology-first businesses, Michael Pizzi, executive vice president and global head of technology and operations at Morgan Stanley, has a track record as a builder.

As CEO of E-Trade at the time of its 2020 acquisition by Morgan Stanley, he said the experience of running a digital-first brokerage whose "storefront was the web" continues to shape his philosophy. Under his management, technology at Morgan Stanley is treated both as support infrastructure and as an integral part of the business itself, designed to meet evolving customer expectations.

That mindset has helped drive a sweeping expansion of AI across the firm. Morgan Stanley deploys generative AI tools across hundreds of use cases, with roughly 98% of 80,000 employees now having access to at least one of these programs, the firm said.

Learn more about Pizzi's initiatives.

Jude Schramm, EVP, CIO

Fifth Third Bank

When Fifth Third Bank named Jude Schramm chief information officer in 2018, the former GE Aviation executive brought with him an industrial engineer's mindset and nearly 17 years of experience building digital businesses.

Eight years later, and now grappling with the recently completed $10.9 billion merger of Fifth Third with Comerica, the ever-expanding possibilities of AI and payment technologies are keeping him on his toes.

"The pace of change has exponentially sped up, especially as you look at what's happening from an AI standpoint," Schramm said.

Carol Juel, EVP, Chief Technology and Operating Officer

Synchrony Financial

Carol Juel has spent nearly a dozen years helping shape Synchrony Financial's evolution from a newly-independent consumer finance company into a technology-driven commerce platform.

Juel, who currently serves as executive vice president and chief technology and operating officer, joined the company ahead of its 2014 spinoff from General Electric. Synchrony Financial raised $2.9 billion, making it one of the largest IPOs that year.

Almost 12 years later, she is guiding the company through another shift: the rising prominence of artificial intelligence across the finance industry.

Learn more about Juel's accomplishments.

Raman Bhatia, Group CEO

Starling Bank

If you want to build a customer-first experience, then doing away with innovation focused on product- and business-line verticals is a must. So is the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into everything the bank does. Looking back over 2025, Raman Bhatia, group CEO of Starling Bank, said he is most proud of "putting safe, scalable, artificial intelligence tools in the hands of customers." The goal is to help customers manage, protect, and grow their money without leaving the app ecosystem. "We are defining what comes next in the intersection of digital banking and AI," he said. "We're very excited about that space."

He points to two product releases in 2025 that reflect this intersection. One is "Spending Intelligence." The tool allows customers to ask questions in plain English about their finances. For example, "how much did I spend on coffee in 2025?" This gives customers financial insights in a very conversational style, he said.

Matt Linderman, CIO

Atlantic Union Bank

When Atlantic Union Bank completed its $14 billion acquisition of Sandy Spring Bancorp last year, call center volume was back to normal in six days. That almost never happens in a bank merger.

Matt Linderman, the bank's CIO, credits much of that success to what he calls innovation 'with a little i.' Prior to joining Atlantic Union in 2023, he had spent 20 years working at large banks including Capital One and PNC, places where the solution to most problems is to go out and buy the most cutting-edge technology, he said.

He surprised a lot of colleagues when he opted to move to a smaller, regional bank. His rationale was simple: "I want to make a big impact, which is just hard to do at a big institution."

Ather Williams III, Head of Global Payments & Liquidity and Wholesale Digital

Wells Fargo

A lot of people think of innovation as the province of flashy young startups, unencumbered by legacy systems and old ways of doing business. Don't tell that to Ather Williams III.

The head of global payments and liquidity and wholesale digital for giant Wells Fargo & Co. believes there's no better lab for his "human-centered" approach to innovation than an organization with some 44 million customers, 20,000 middle-market business clients and more than $1 trillion of daily payment flows.

"We're at the forefront of all the change going on in the industry, whether it's crypto, real-time payments or cross-border payments," Williams says. "We can build things at scale in a way that even your largest unicorn fintechs can't do. …It's an exciting time to be in the space."

Ryan Hildebrand, Chief Innovation Officer

Bankwell Bank

The importance of loans to small banks probably can't be overstated, but the process can be cumbersome and last weeks. There's no shortage of artificial intelligence tools to help lenders speed the process, but how do you know which ones to trust? Ryan Hildebrand, chief innovation officer for Connecticut-based Bankwell Bank, likes to go straight to the fintech source.

"We're usually the first customer for a lot of these startups," Hildebrand said in an interview. "We're able to help them create their software the way that banks need it to work, but understand that they've got to build stuff quickly, too." One of these early collaborations was with two Stanford MBA grads who specialized in AI. Hildebrand persuaded them to focus on small-business loans rather than mortgages and the Casca lending platform was born.

Learn more about Hildebrand's work.

Steve Hagerman, CIO

Truist

When Steve Hagerman, chief information officer at Truist, took on his role in October 2024, one of his early priorities was embedding AI and automation directly into Truist's core operating model.

"Over my first year here, I spent a lot of time stabilizing risk management, risk governance, risk systems," said Hagerman. "Now, with that largely normalized and stabilized, we're on our front foot as we exit 2025 and move into this year."

In 2025, the bank deployed over 50 AI use cases across fraud prevention, digital engagement, call centers, wholesale banking and internal operations. This effort accelerated a multiyear transformation that was already underway following the 2019 merger of BB&T and SunTrust, which created the $442 billion bank.

Learn more about Hagerman's approach to innovation.

Jonathan Crane, SVP, Head of Consumer Bank, Securities, & Enterprise Technology

Axos Bank

Jonathan Crane strives to stay at the forefront of digital innovation. To achieve that goal, Crane — senior vice president and head of consumer banking, securities and enterprise technology at Axos Bank — tries to sidestep what he considers a huge tech misstep in banking.

"The biggest mistake banks make is treating digital transformation as a cost center or a modernization exercise," said Crane, a 13-year employee of Axos. "We've learned to tie every investment to a business outcome upfront. If you can't articulate how it drives revenue, reduces cost or improves speed, you probably should question why you're doing it."

"Technology teams should be accountable to business metrics, not just delivery milestones," he added.

Learn more about Crane's work at Axos.

Mohan Sankararaman, Chief Innovation Officer

First Horizon Corp.

For Mohan Sankararaman, chief information officer at First Horizon, technology change is nothing new. In more than 30 years in banking tech, including 17 years at First Horizon, he has worked through the shift from mainframes to PCs and Oracle databases, the rise of the internet, and the digitization of banking.

Those waves have set the ground for his current mission, where the past two years have been dominated by upgrading how the bank uses data and AI tools.

"Are we wired for this type of change? Absolutely. But I'm not diminishing how hard change is," he said. "We're always on our toes trying to learn and adopt new things."

Learn more about his approach to innovation.

Jon Lofthouse, CIO

Citi

Jon Lofthouse will tell you he's only ever had two real jobs.

For nearly three decades he worked at Citi, where he launched his banking career at Salomon Brothers before it was folded into the firm in 1998. Before that, he spent a year building software used to refuel nuclear power stations.

"I've had an interest in technology for a long time," he said. "My parents bought me a computer when I was about seven—a ZX Spectrum." It was one of the most popular home computers in the U.K.throughout the 1980s, sort of the British equivalent of the Commodore 64 in the U.S.

At Citi, the former CIO has had an outsized impact on the technology powering America's third-largest bank, with $2.67 trillion in total assets. [Editor's note: After his selection as one of the Most Innovative People in Finance, Lofthouse left Citi.] His mission was to simplify the bank's core technology systems. In 2025 alone, he helped retire or replace 384 different applications to streamline everything from risk analytics to payments infrastructure and client services.

Aleda DeMaria, COO

PeoplesBank

Aleda DeMaria might seem like a traditional banker on paper, with more than 25 years in banking dating back to her first job at a community bank in high school. But her drive for innovation—overseeing nine conversions and revamping the entire operation at PeoplesBank as its COO—is anything but ordinary.

Last year, she led the bank's largest technology transformation in its history: Replacing a legacy system dating back to the 1980s with a modern, cloud-native core banking platform for the $4.5 billion-asset institution based in Holyoke, Mass. The five-year project, completed ahead of schedule with more than 24,000 customers enrolled on the first day, positions PeoplesBank into the next century, DeMaria said. It has 100 new digital initiatives in the works, including implementing AI and software robots.

Learn more about DeMaria's initiatives.

Kristin Milchanowski, Chief AI and Data Officer

BMO

As BMO's chief AI and data officer since October 2024, Kristin Milchanowski is responsible for enterprise-wide AI, data, analytics, and robotics strategy, as well as strengthening the data governance, risk management, and operating foundations across the organization. Her goal is for AI to fundamentally change how the bank operates—from productivity to decision support to collaboration. To that end, she has put the task of changing the culture front and center.

During her first year, BMO launched "AI for All," an enterprise-wide upskilling initiative designed to build AI literacy and responsible usage among employees. "I'm probably most proud that we approached the culture shift by inclusion" she said. "We didn't skip anyone, and we've had nearly a 100% try-out rate. We wanted everyone to feel empowered and included and creative."

Gill Haus, CIO, Consumer & Community Banking

JPMorganChase

Digital transformation has been accompanied by digital demystification at JPMorganChase thanks to a program that Gill Haus helped launch.

Known as Decode, the award-winning program breaks down complex topics for people at all levels and in various roles at the bank, helping them understand the "why" behind technology decisions, Haus said.

"Speaking in your audience's language is the key," said Haus, chief information officer of consumer and community banking at Chase, where he oversees more than 16,000 technologists and an annual budget of $9 billion.

It's a key Haus has used to unlock significant changes in the way JPMorganChase adopts and views technology.

Learn more about Haus' approach to innovation.

Dominic Venturo, SEVP and Chief Digital Officer

U.S. Bank

The leadership team at U.S. Bank has been keenly focused on leveraging powerful innovation across a range of new and existing business units and enterprise platforms. The man at the center of a good part of that is Senior EVP and Chief Digital Officer Dominic Venturo, who is responsible for driving digital banking across consumer, small business, corporate and institutional banking, while also leading the enterprise platforms, experience design, agile delivery, and innovation groups. Under his leadership, U.S. Bank has had several "firsts," including the first bank on all three digital assistant platforms (Siri, Alexa, Google), the first on all three top mobile wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay) and also the first to sign on with Zelle.

When considering his work over the past year, Venturo cites the development of U.S. Bank's enterprise platform as a key differentiator and competitive advantage that allows the bank to develop products in months instead of years and do multiple releases per month. "We have built out an amazing set of capabilities leveraging common sets of tools and processes across the entire enterprise to deliver products and features to our customers," he said.

Chris Ward, Head of Enterprise Payments

Truist

Since Chris Ward joined Truist as Head of Enterprise Payments about four years ago, he has shifted payments innovation at the bank from isolated launches to building a payments ecosystem that delivers compounding benefits to the bank and its customers: fewer manual touchpoints, fewer errors and exceptions, faster posting and confirmation, clearer cash visibility and safety by design.

Underpinning this innovation strategy, he says, is a repeatable operating system he calls the "4 S's"—simplicity (eliminate fragmentation so clients work from one workflow), speed (replace batch and delay with real-time certainty), safety (design so scale does not increase risk) and smart execution (apply automation, AI and APIs so payments are less exception-driven and easier to run).

Learn more about Ward's initiatives.

Michael Ruttledge, CIO and Head of Enterprise Technology & Security

Citizens Financial

Michael Ruttledge began his tech career programming in COBOL on a mainframe. Forty years later, as CIO of Citizens Financial, he's about to unplug the last one.

"We are the first super-regional bank to move its entire mainframe and every business application into the cloud," he said. "No one has done that. Not even banks like Capital One. Nobody. That is truly an industry first."

Ruttledge said his team has migrated 700 applications over the last four years and eliminated another 600.

"Right now I'm literally in my data centers disconnecting storage, network, and the remnants of legacy servers," he said. "We'll be fully out within the next couple of months."

Bobby Grubert, Head of AI and Digital Innovation

RBC Capital Markets

Bobby Grubert, who stepped into his role as head of AI and Digital Innovation in May 2025, sees RBC Capital Markets at an "inflection point" where AI is shifting from experimental tool to an embedded collaborator.

He took on the mandate and now oversees a $19.8 million budget, amid significant shifts at RBC, including the launch of an enterprise-wide AI group and a decision to move AI to the center of its capital markets strategy.

Grubert has spent nearly 30 years at the bank, starting as an energy trader in 1996 and rising through multiple senior roles.

RBC launched Borealis as an R&D arm focusing on machine learning and natural language processing a decade ago, so AI is not new to them.

Fred Lie, SVP, Chief Digital Banking Officer

Hanmi Bank

A certain office supplies retailer rolled out an "Easy Button" marketing campaign in 2005 that touted the ability of its products and services to help simplify our lives.

Fred Lie embraces the "Easy Button" approach in guiding Hanmi Bank's adoption of fintech, which he believes should emphasize the "easy" factor and de-emphasize the "cool" factor.

"In my professional world, I believe that one's true value is measured by how much you make the lives of those around you easier," said Lie, senior vice president and chief digital banking officer at Hanmi. "The easier a customer can securely access their funds and manage their accounts, the more value the bank creates for that customer — even more than any favorable rate or discounted fee."

Stephen Randall, Global Head, Liquidity Management Services and Core Accounts

Citi

Devoting half his time and 30% of his budget to new initiatives, Citi's Stephen Randall, global head of liquidity management services, has guided the development and launch of corporate-client liquidity management services built on top of the latest technology while fine-tuning existing products.

Joining other global banks to support Swift's ongoing blockchain project to facilitate real-time, 24/7 cross-border payments, Citi launched its own cross-border payment service based on distributed ledger technology two years ago. Citi Token Services has been integrated into the existing Citi Services infrastructure, enabling clients to initiate instant funding transfers around the clock between offices in the U.S., U.K., Singapore and Hong Kong. Payments are automatically converted from fiat USD to tokens and back again.

Learn more about Randall's initiatives.

Russell Barrett, SEVP, COO

Valley National Bank

Russell Barrett has spent much of his banking career in transformation mode.

During a 22-year career at BNP Paribas, Barrett held several executive roles, including chief information officer and head of change and solutions. Later, at Bank Leumi USA, Barrett led technology and digital transformation efforts as CIO. In 2021, he joined Valley National Bank, where he was chief transformation officer before his promotion to chief operating officer.

Today, he's helping the $63 billion bank— which has launched more than 50 digital transformation initiatives in the past year — cope with and prepare for the onslaught of advancements in artificial intelligence. Barrett said banks that lack a "data culture" and "growth mindset" will be unable to keep pace with the evolution of AI. But he believes Valley is well positioned to capitalize on AI innovations.

Learn more about Barrett's work.

Javier Rodríguez Soler, Head of Sustainability and Corporate & Investment Banking

BBVA

Javier Rodríguez Soler, head of sustainability and corporate and investment banking (CIB) at BBVA, takes the long view when it comes to investing. "Sustainability is no longer a political theme; it is an economic one," he said. "Investment decisions in sectors such as energy, infrastructure or industry are not made with a five- or 10-year horizon, but with a 30- or 40-year perspective." Over time, he said, "sustainability will be fully embedded in financial products, risk frameworks and capital allocation."

Over the past year, under Rodríguez Soler's leadership, BBVA CIB has grown its own sustainable finance initiatives through digital innovation and partnerships. Projects involve sustainability-linked supply chain finance and tools that let clients assess their environmental impact in real time. A partnership with global investment firm KKR aims to develop digital tools that support energy transition, and another with global trade solutions firm Olea enables the digitization of supply chain finance for multinational clients.

Learn more about Rodríguez Soler's initiatives.

Bryan Ford, EVP, Head of Corporate Sales & Treasury Management

Regions Bank

Bryan Ford has spent 19 years at Regions Bank pushing a singular narrative: treasury management isn't a back-office utility—it's the heartbeat of the client relationship.

"Treasury management allows us to have a primary relationship with that business owner and the folks that work at that company so that we become embedded in their day-to-day activities," Ford said. "That's different than just a transactional account."

As EVP and head of corporate sales and treasury management, Ford leads a team of 295 across treasury, payments, and liquidity. The whole group operates under what he calls a "Momentum Matters" framework.

Learn more about Ford's work at Regions.

Derik Farrar, Head of Everyday Banking and Borrowing

U.S. Bank

Extraordinary innovation in banking isn't just about agentic commerce and virtual assistants. Even in 2026, it can be as simple as the meaningless 6/7 internet meme that's repurposed to nearly double CD sales at U.S. Bank, the fifth largest bank in America with more than $660 billion in assets.

"We took a product that's existed since the beginning of banking [a certificate of deposit] and brought a little bit of a modern twist to it," said Derik Farrar, U.S. Bank Head of Everyday Banking and Borrowing.

The idea for the 6/7 CD took root came about at a bank offsite. A colleague had a t-shirt gun, but Farrar figured no one needed more company apparel. At the time, his teenagers were into the 6/7 meme which had gone viral on social media, and lots of the other execs had kids around the same age, so everyone got shirts riffing on 6/7. The shirts, which had absolutely nothing to do with U.S. Bank's strategy, were a huge hit – all the executives wanted one for their kids.