The Most Powerful Women in Banking NEXT 2026

The Most Powerful Women in Banking NEXT

Published October 1, 2026 7:02 AM

1 Min Read

The rising generation of financial services leaders—whether at mega-banks, super-regionals, community banks and digital banks—must be capable of delivering results while simultaneously positioning their businesses and teams for what lies ahead.

That requires an artful blend of business savvy, technology innovation, and adaptable leadership capabilities. Executives recognized in The Most Powerful Women in Banking NEXT ranking demonstrate this across the board, seeing across traditional organizational boundaries, understanding how lending, deposits, payments, asset and wealth management, data, risk and technology intersect to create new growth opportunities.

Leading this year's group of 25 NEXT honorees is #1-ranked Morgan Stanley's Ambreen Sayed, executive director of technology investment banking, followed by Goldman Sachs' Anne-Victoire Auriault, head of global program trading and ETF trading (#2), KeyBank's Emily Gessner, head of consumer digital (#3), Bank of America's Allison Whelan, director and hedge fund credit officer (#4), Servbank's Shayna Arrington, chief risk officer, and 20 other rising leaders whose performances reflect a commitment to leading their teams during a time of continuous transformation and generating measurable outcomes for their companies.

Commercial instinct and enterprise thinking are foundational to their success. As their roles and responsibilities increase, these rising leaders are identifying where revenue, deposits, fee income and economic value will come from, recognizing when existing business models are fading in relevance, and using disciplined capital allocation to benefit their businesses.

They also demonstrate a greater fluency in innovation, reflecting the growing influence of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, digital identity and trust, real-time payments and on-chain finance on customer experiences, operating models and competitive economics.

The talent of these leaders is having a multiplier effect—on their teams, the companies for which they work, and, over time, just possibly the industry as a whole.

Read the other rankings:

The Most Powerful Women in Banking

The Most Powerful Women in Finance

The Most Powerful Women in Banking's Women to Watch

The Most Powerful Women in Banking Top Teams

Ambreen Sayed, Morgan Stanley

Executive Director, Technology Investment Banking

Most technology investment bankers arrive at Morgan Stanley by a predictable path, usually involving a finance major, a college Wall Street internship, and then a slot as junior analyst right after graduation. Ambreen Sayed's journey wound through an engineering degree and then co-founding a startup. The less traditional path has led her to be a rising star at the white-shoe bank, where she was named technology investment banking group COO in 2025.

After studying engineering at the University of Michigan, Sayed joined Modern Guild, an education technology company, and rose to chief operating officer, learning the mechanics of building a business from the inside. But a desire to truly understand the finance side of business — how to properly raise capital and scale up — led her to Wharton for her MBA and then Morgan Stanley in 2018. Sayed has spent nearly a decade in New York advising technology-focused companies on IPOs, M&A and financings.

Anne-Victoire Auriault, Goldman Sachs

Head of Global Program Trading and ETF Trading

You don't become head of a global trading desk at Goldman Sachs if you're afraid of a little risk. As is often the case with the bank, the numbers back it up, and Goldman is hitting record revenue in several of its largest markets.

One of those—global program trading and ETF trading—is headed by Anne-Victoire Auriault. Made one of the bank's youngest-ever partners when she was 32, Auriault helped equities revenue rise 25% in the first quarter this year—to a record $5.3 billion from $4.2 billion in the year-ago period. More broadly, Goldman's Global Banking and Markets unit had record first-quarter revenue, while in 2025 revenue from fixed-income, currencies and commodities hit a record as well.

Emily Gessner, KeyBank

Head of Consumer Digital

Regional banks exist in a sort of glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situation. Not big enough to be out front in tech innovation, they sit back and see what works and what doesn't. And then, they're small enough to take risks with how they deploy proven technology.

One comes away with these thoughts if you spend time speaking with Emily Gessner, head of consumer digital at KeyBank. Gessner demands discipline from herself and her part of KeyBank's business, but she also seems raring to do something new.

"We're never going to have the tech budget that the trillionaire banks have," Gessner said in an interview. "The rigor around how we spend our tech dollars is heightened for all the right reasons. We want to be a differentiator. We want to be first to market. I think we have grown in that area, and I think we'll continue to grow."

Alison Whelan, Bank of America

Director, Hedge Fund Credit Officer

Alison Whelan, who oversees Bank of America credit officers covering more than 200 hedge fund-management companies, tries to lead with a style that encourages transparency and collaboration, like the culture that she works best within, she said.

"Creating a safe space for people to raise questions, especially when you're in a risk management role, is very important," said Whelan, a hedge fund credit officer in BofA's global markets credit division. "People who work with me, I think they know that I'll be in the trenches with them. I'm very happy to let them fight their own battles. But once they need me, they know I'm ready to be tapped in as required."

Stated simply, her job as a credit officer is to answer the question: "Will this client pay us back?" Whelan said. That leads to higher-level questions about how much to lend, lending terms, collateral, client risk profiles, and the nuances of complex trading products and their markets. "There are questions on questions on questions," she said.

Shayna Arrington, Servbank

Chief Risk Officer

As outside counsel to financial institutions early in her career, Shayna Arrington saw some companies that followed the rules regardless of whether they made economic sense. Others did what they wanted and asked for forgiveness later.

"That gave me a really good perspective on where my risk appetite was personally and the importance of aligning with an institution that shared that risk appetite," Arrington said.

She found a match in 2017 at The Money Source, a Phoenix-based correspondent lender that has diversified over the last decade into banking through an affiliated company called Servbank, based in Oswego, Illinois. Arrington is now the bank's chief risk officer.

Alexandra Ford, Bank of America

Managing Director, Leveraged Loan Trading

Alexandra Ford has played a vital role in bringing electronic trading to two of the last financial market holdouts: leveraged loans and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs). Working closely with Octaura Securities Trading, whose platform has steadily gained market share, she helped design and launch its request-for-quote protocol for loans and last year for CLOs, providing insight into the needs of syndicated loan market participants and trading desks.

"It's one of the most significant innovations in the leveraged loan market that we've seen," Bank of America's Ford said.

Ford discovered her interest in capital markets and their relation to macro global events during a summer internship at Bank of America. Graduating from Georgetown University, she joined the bank's high-yield desk in 2015, shifted to leveraged loans the next year, and has steadily risen to senior trader and now managing director of leveraged loan trading.

Learn more about Ford's career.

Xin Lin, Citi

Managing Director, South Asia Cluster Head for Platforms and Data Services, Citi Services

In a 13-month sabbatical several years ago, Xin Lin visited 12 countries and 135 municipalities, even learning Spanish to explore Latin America's wide-ranging cultures. That interest in different peoples serves her well as the leader of a team promoting and supporting Citi's digital strategy across nine countries in southern Asia.

Toggling between Citi and Goldman Sachs over her career, Lin has developed expertise in areas including corporate treasury and bank balance-sheet management. Since December 2023, she has managed Citi platforms and data-services products, to improve clients' digital interaction with the bank. Her team works with clients whose business cultures, technology adoption and regulations vary widely.

To accommodate the differences she emphasizes empathy and open communication, with her team members as well as clients. Based in her native Singapore, that means visiting local Citi bankers and clients to discuss their markets' particulars.

Yasmin Tailor, Ally Financial

Executive Director and Consumer Banking CFO

Yasmin Tailor has been at Ally Financial for five years, but this past year has been one of the most challenging. She helped lead a consumer banking transformation that was"one of the most significant in the bank's history," she said.

Tailor oversees three core parts of the $165 billion digital bank's business: its $144 billion retail deposits arm, its $21 billion in brokerage and advisory assets, and its consumer-facing operations. In 2025, she and her team kicked off a strategy shift aimed at managing interest rate sensitivity on the deposits side, lowering the cost of funds and keeping customers happy throughout it all.

"The challenge was navigating multiple high-stakes changes simultaneously, while keeping the organization focused, aligned and moving forward," Tailor said.

Mary-Ammielle Stone, M&T Bank

SVP, SBA Lending Manager

Mary-Ammielle Stone, M&T Bank's business banking regional manager in Rochester, New York, has based her team-building leadership style on lessons absorbed from several of her managers at the bank.

They taught her the importance of building rapport through shared enjoyment, said Stone, who joined M&T in 2017. That may come through an event like a holiday dress-up day for branch employees, she said, or a week designated for bankers to share selfies taken out in the community during their free time.

"The number one thing I've learned is: Be yourself. I like to have fun; I like to laugh," she said. "I believe positivity is contagious. Negativity can be as well, but if we start our day with a smile, a genuine connection, whether it's with our teams, our colleagues or our clients, it makes everyone's day just a little bit better; it makes everyone want to work a little bit harder and it drives that community connectivity with the bank."

Kisondra Tanev, Bank of America

Managing Director, Power & Utilities Investment Banking Group

Kisondra Tanev enjoys sailing in Long Island Sound with her family in part because it involves extensive planning, pulling together wind speed, tide levels, weather outlook and other information that inform critical decisions. Her love of planning and analysis has also been a major benefit to BofA's clients in the rapidly changing power and utilities sector that today intersects technology, infrastructure and public policy.

"With electrification, AI-driven load growth, decarbonization, grid monetization … it's a culmination of all the interests I've been drawn to," Tanev said.

That's been a boon to longtime BofA clients NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy, whose merger earlier this year BofA advised. Tanev and her team had informed Nextera about Dominion's progress addressing a range of issues that improved deal's dynamics.

Learn more about Tanev's work at the bank.

Liza Januzi, TD Securities

Regional Head for Financial Institutions, Americas

Quickly climbing the ranks at TD Securities over the last 16 years, Liza Januzi, regional head for financial institutions, Americas, displayed her leadership chops when charged at the start of 2025 with developing and implementing a long-term growth strategy for the overall unit. (In April of this year, Januzi was promoted to head the financial institutions (FI) unit of the bank's global transaction banking (GTB) business segment.)

She and her team built the strategic vision and identified key competitive components to grow GTB's FI business over the next five years. They also developed a realistic roadmap and reassessed how to use talent as effectively as possible. With that analysis in hand, she distilled a concise strategic plan that she presented to senior leadership, not just in GTB but also in the corporate and investment banking and global markets divisions.

Learn more about Januzi's work.

Rachel Weinmann, Huntington National Bank

Bank Division President, North Texas

Rachel Weinmann, division president for North Texas at Huntington National Bank, has accumulated years of banking experience, earned responsibility for a major growth market, and developed a leadership style rooted in accountability and transparency.

Weinmann led the Dallas division, which included 12 branches across the DFW metro area and 111 retail and commercial banking employees. Under her leadership, 28 relationship managers produced $452.5 million in new loan production, a 69% increase from the prior year's $267.6 million.

As part of her remit, Weinmann restructured how the bank's relationship managers were trained and developed. The existing loan process unintentionally favored bankers with strong credit backgrounds, while talented employees from retail banking, operations, and marketing backgrounds were spending too much time navigating internal credit processes instead of serving customers and generating business.

Learn more about Weinmann's work.

Carly Nathanson, Wilmington Trust

Senior Wealth Investment Advisor

Carly Nathanson traces her career to a first-grade memory: watching her older brother do division and multiplication homework and refusing to be left out. "I was really into numbers and math," she said. "I was one of those kids who actually wanted to work in finance for my work life."

That numbers focus led her through an economics degree at Columbia University, internships on trading floors and a role in portfolio management at Northern Trust. But Nathanson wanted more than just numbers, she wanted to connect with people, too. Joining Wilmington Trust in 2021, she got to combine her love of numbers with a close connection to clients.

"I'm able to be analytical with numbers that I love and also be client-facing," she explained. "I love getting to know people and their families and businesses."

Tara Edmonds, SouthState Bank

SVP, Enterprise Payments Strategy

As SVP, enterprise payments strategy, Tara Edmonds leads payments strategy across consumer, small business, commercial, treasury, correspondent and corporate payments at SouthState Bank in North Carolina. Edmonds said the strongest measure of her impact last year was "moving payments from a primarily operational function to a strategic platform for growth, client experience, and deposit retention."

Edmonds has been with SouthState for 13 years, starting in 2013 as a part-time teller. She moved into deposit operations the next year, and they moved to information technology in 2018, leading technology service provider management, core banking conversions, treasury management platforms, and IT strategy. Eventually, that path led to payments. Today, she works across the bank with teams in corporate, commercial, small business, consumer, and specialty banking.

"When I look back, every role taught me something different. Starting in the branch, moving through operations, spending time in technology, and now leading payments strategy has given me a unique perspective on how all the pieces fit together and how important collaboration is to driving meaningful change," she told American Banker.

Learn more about Edmond's work at the bank.

Olivia Ferris, Capstone Partners

COO

Olivia Ferris has always built her career on the belief that if she listened closely enough, she could see what's coming and put that intelligence gathering to work. As COO of Capstone Partners, a subsidiary of Huntington Bancshares, Ferris has spent years turning private business owners' notoriously guarded finances into forecastable data about referrals and pipelines.

But you can't always predict what comes next, and that's a strange thing to reckon with for someone used to forecasting potential growth outcomes. "You can create KPIs. You can create dashboards. You can track data," she said. "And the world can still turn upside down in a heartbeat."

Learn more about Ferris' personal and professional journey.

Hailey Orr, MUFG Americas

Managing Director, Head of Corporate Strategy & Development

After her promotion to lead corporate strategy in October 2024, MUFG Americas' Hailey Orr last year led a buildout of a new, stress-model framework for the portfolios and growth initiatives of the U.S. arm of the $2.7-trillion Japanese banking giant.

The "Earnings-at-Risk" framework was pegged to upgrade the bank's standard strategic planning method, combining traditional strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats (SWOT) and contingency planning for potential downside scenario models that mapped the outcomes of proposed initiatives and investments against MUFG Americas' risk-tolerance strategy.

"We create stress scenarios, either based on potential macro-economic events or based on idiosyncratic events that would specifically challenge MUFG's portfolio in the Americas," Orr said of the framework. "We then use those scenarios to stress test across different risk stripes—credit, rates, underwriting, operating, etc."

Karen Arrabal, Fifth Third Bank

Managing Director, Head of Corporate Development & Strategy

A mother receives her monthly food-assistance benefit, heads to the store and swipes her card—only to find the balance is gone. Someone has skimmed the card number and stolen the funds.

For Karen Arrabal, senior director of financial crimes and investigations at Fifth Third Bank, that kind of transaction is never just a data point or an alert. "There's a person on the other side of that transaction," she says. "That means a kid doesn't eat because the money was stolen from them."

That human perspective guides Arrabal's work in anti-money laundering and fraud investigations for Fifth Third's customers and its Midwest regional communities. Her expertise is driving new efforts to connect financial data with nationwide efforts to disrupt human trafficking and the distribution of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).

Learn more about Arrabal's efforts to fight fraud.

Perry Bailey, First Citizens Bank

Regional EVP, Community Region

One might expect the daughter of a bank executive to start out their career by sliding right into a cushy corner office.

Not First Citizens' Perry Bailey, daughter of Chair and CEO Frank Holding, Jr. She started out in the trenches as a teller at a branch in Winston-Salem, helping customers who no doubt didn't realize they were depositing a check or making a withdrawal with North Carolina banking royalty.

"My focus in my career has always been on learning as much as I can," says Bailey, who started with the organization in 2016 and is now a Regional EVP. "As a teller or on customer service lines, I learned an appreciation for what customers need and what associates face on a daily basis. My best lessons came from those early conversations."

Learn more about Bailey's career.

Lena McCloskey, First Horizon

SVP, Head of Banking Quality and Productivity

The abundance of paperwork that accompanies consumer lending is well known and disliked all around. It can be inefficient too, requiring ink-on-paper signatures that slow things down.

Lena McCloskey, SVP and head of banking quality and productivity at First Horizon, knew that embedding DocuSign into lending operations would cut the length of the process to onboard and book a loan at the Memphis bank. Loans are now processed in two to three days, down from 10 to 13. Another seemingly-mundane task—organizing the file structure for the many documents generated in a loan application—has had a recent AI upgrade. It's been a game changer at the bank, McCloskey said.

"On average, it saves about two to three minutes per document. So, it's saved hundreds of hours just within three months of use," she said in an interview. "That means we're giving our teams back the time that they can spend on the value-add activities, on relationship building [and] relationship deepening."

Learn more about McCloskey's work at the bank.

Bianca Zwart, bunq

Chief Strategy Officer

When neobank bunq began in 2012 it had a simple, two-pronged plan: create a product people would pay for and love, and become profitable. As one of the first 30 people hired at the bank, Bianca Zwart has helped to craft and oversee both missions.

The current chief strategy officer has risen from entry level to now oversee operations at bunq, the largest unit in the firm, and has helped to generate the kind of growth her larger peers on Wall Street dream of.

As of late September, bunq had more than doubled its customer deposits to EUR 10 billion from EUR 4.5 billion in 2023; over that same period the number of users shot up over 100% to 22 million from 9 million. The Netherlands-based company is in its third consecutive year of profitability, Zwart said in an interview.

Annie Cheslin, Wells Fargo Securities

Managing Director, High-Grade Municipal Trading

The $4.5 trillion U.S. municipal bond market has been one of the slowest to adopt electronic trading—for many good reasons—but that's changing.

In addition to what Wells Fargo Securities' Annie Cheslin describes as a "very robust electronic trading platform," the managing director of high-grade municipal trading, who focuses on trading tax-exempt muni bonds for institutional clients, said that artificial intelligence (AI) is adding to how the bank and its customers survey the market for debt issued by municipalities, cities and governments.

"We are definitely using AI tools to be a better liquidity provider for our customer to provide tighter bid-ask [spreads]," she said. "Clients are definitely curious how we're integrating AI into how we're trading. Obviously, AI is going to be a huge tool for data management and how we can harness some of that information through trades and if we can analyze trends and share that with our clients."

Lauren Portnoi, Citi

Managing Director, Citi Corporate Banking, Technology Coverage

When Lauren Portnoi joined the technology desk for the corporate banking division of Citi in the early 2010s, she found herself working with well-established, large-cap companies.

Over the last few years, the clientele has changed dramatically, she said.

"There are companies going from zero to many-billion-dollar valuations overnight," said Portnoi, a senior banker at New York-based Citi. "We've had to learn to lend to and bank differently to an entirely new client set of pre-IPO companies and earlier stage companies, not always cash-flow positive."

Christina Choi, Hanmi Bank

SVP and Banking Manager

When Christina Choi, a Hanmi Bank SBA district manager, was picked for a key leadership role in the bank's conversion to a new commercial loan system, her boss knew she was perfect for the job.

"She's relentless in trying to learn things, but she's also very good about sharing her knowledge and teaching people who work for her," said Anna Chung, chief community lending officer at Hanmi, an $8 billion bank based in Los Angeles. "She was very good at understanding her area, which is credit, but then when the people in our closing or loan documentation section were struggling because they weren't as capable in understanding the system itself, she literally learned that area and helped them out."

Learn more about Choi's work.

Nathalie Leclef, J.P. Morgan

Executive Director - Private Banker

When Nathalie Leclef joined J.P. Morgan private bank five years ago, Jackie Young Perrins, market manager at the firm, touted her "talent, experience and holistic approach." But one thing Leclef didn't come to the bank with was any clients or assets.

"I have built a practice entirely from scratch," Leclef, who manages the wealth of institutional and ultra-high net worth individual clients at the firm, said. "I have personally sourced, developed and closed all of my business, with the majority of the clients acquired through cold calling and proactive outbound business development."

She now manages more than $600 million at the private bank, and has average client relationships of more than $25 million.

Lane Redding, United Community Bank

Market President and Senior Lender

Lane Redding is focused on growth, in all aspects of her professional life.

As a Florida-based market president and senior lender at United Community supporting four regional branches, Redding spent 2025 finding new ways to help her organization grow — as well as her colleagues, her community, and the businesses she supports as a banking executive.

While participating in United's annual leadership academy in 2024, Redding helped develop and pitch a business banking program to the executive team, having identified a critical talent-development gap within the bank's operations.

"We didn't have a direct path from branch banking to commercial lending," she said, noting that talented retail staff had few pathways to career growth other than leaving United, gaining experience elsewhere, and then hoping to return to the bank in a larger role. "It felt like, when are we going to start developing our own talent," she queried.