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Most Powerful Women to Watch 2023

The Most Powerful Women to Watch 2023

By Editorial Staff
September 27, 2023 8:10 AM
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Women lead some of the largest and most influential financial institutions in the U.S.
The 2023 Women to Watch list features influential leaders at the top of banks and financial institutions, with Citi's Tasnim Ghiawadwala at #1. Several of these women run their own companies, including Bonnie Lee, the CEO of Hanmi Bank, and Anne Clark Wolff, the CEO of Independence Point Advisors. Others are division heads like Wells Fargo's Kristy Fercho and Kim-Thu Posnett of Goldman Sachs, or C-level executives like HSBC's Kavita Mahtani and First Horizon's Hope Dmuchowski. These women are on the upswing; keep your eye out for them in the years ahead. 

Also be sure to check out:

The Most Powerful Women in Banking
The Most Powerful Women in Finance
Top Teams
The Most Powerful Women in Banking: Next

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Tasnim Ghiawadwala

Global Head of Commercial Bank
Citigroup
As the head of Citi's commercial bank, Tasnim Ghiawadwala provides full-scale products and services to midsize companies across the globe. In 2022, that meant delivering "the right solution at the right time," as she put it, to 14,000 enterprise businesses beset by inflation, rising interest rates and the rising costs of materials and labor.

Read her full profile.
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Lori Heinel

Global Chief Investment Officer
State Street Global Advisors
At the forefront of State Street's asset management business – with $3.6 trillion of assets under management – stands Lori Heinel, with a resolute commitment to revolutionize State Street's portfolio of investment strategies, from its tried-and-true index funds and exchange-traded funds to its multi-asset class solutions and alternative investments.

Read her full profile.
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Aarthi Murali

Chief Customer Experience Officer
M&T Bank
To gauge success in her quest to enhance the customer experience at M&T Bank, Aarthi Murali examines key aspects of their behavior.

She can look at how long customers wait on the phone, for example, or how many times they have to click on the bank's app to get to where they want to go. 

Read her full profile.
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Angela Mago

President, Key Commercial Bank and KeyBank Real Estate Capital
KeyBank
Rate volatility and economic anxiety made for a tempestuous year at regional banks across the country – especially in their residential and commercial lending divisions. But Angela Mago, president of Key Commercial Bank and KeyBank Real Estate Capital, looks back on 2022 as a shining moment for her team and a vindication of her bank's longtime prioritization of developing relationships with clients.

Read her full profile.
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Ann Fogarty

Executive Vice President, Head of Global Delivery
State Street
In her role as head of global delivery at State Street, Ann Fogarty oversees the entirety of the firm's operations, including responsibility for its $37.6 trillion AUC/A asset servicing business. Her multidimensional purview includes critical areas such as client service, custody, middle-office, accounting and fund administration, alternative operations, transfer agency, reconciliations, complex operations, derivatives and bank loan activities.

Read her full profile.
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Hope Dmuchowski

Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer
First Horizon Corp.
Just three months after Hope Dmuchowski was hired as chief financial officer at First Horizon Corp., the Memphis bank announced that it was being acquired by TD Bank Group in Canada. Dmuchowski spent more than a year waiting for the deal to go through only to have the merger scuttled by regulators in May, sending her back to square one.

Read her full profile.
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Cassandra McKinney

Executive Director, Retail Bank
Comerica Bank  
When the regional banking crisis roiled the sector this spring, Dallas-based Comerica Bank felt the effects, seeing a decline of $3.7 billion in deposits in the three weeks following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. Cassandra McKinney, executive director of the retail bank at Comerica, said she and her team focused on having meaningful discussions with customers about their money management options during this difficult period. 

Read her full profile.
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Kavita Mahtani

Chief Financial Officer, Americas
HSBC North America Holdings
To Kavita Mahtani, the key to successfully navigating big changes at work is constant communication and transparency.

And, as chief financial officer of the Americas for HSBC, her 1,000-person team has seen plenty of changes over the last couple of years.   

Read her full profile.
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Liz Wolverton

Head of Consumer Banking and Brand Experience
Synovus
Just one week after being tapped to run Synovus' consumer banking and brand experience team in December 2021, Liz Wolverton was asked to take on a monumental task: shuttering 15% of the bank's roughly 300 branches.

Read her full profile.
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Ellen Patterson

Senior Executive Vice President, General Counsel
Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo's legal team, led by Ellen Patterson, has one of the most difficult jobs in finance.

After a series of scandals derailed Wells Fargo's relationship with regulators and consumers, adding new executives at the top levels of the bank has helped to refurbish its tarnished reputation. Patterson herself came on roughly three years ago. 

Read her full profile.
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Carissa Rodeheaver

Chairman, CEO and President
First United Bank & Trust and First United Corp.
With multiple interest rate hikes, average inflation of 8%, a war in Ukraine, problems with commercial real estate and the question of a recession hanging over the economy, this has been a challenging year for both the banking industry and for Carissa Rodeheaver, chairman, CEO and president of First United Bank & Trust in Oakland, Maryland.

Read her full profile.
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Laura Lee Stewart

President and CEO
Sound Community Bank
Laura "Laurie" Lee Stewart, president and CEO of Sound Community Bank, believes that the recent turbulence in the financial sector presents an opportunity for women leaders to show the industry how they can manage uncertainty and lead with authority.

Read her full profile.
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Susan Riel

President and CEO
EagleBank
EagleBank, of Bethesda, Maryland, specializes in commercial real estate lending. For most of its history, said president and CEO Susan Riel, that's been a profitable part of the business.

"It's made us one of the top-performing banks in the country," she said. "Between 2016 and 2022, we averaged being in the 83rd percentile in return on average assets (ROAA) of all the about 4,600 depository institutions in the U.S."

Read her full profile.
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Tanya Sanders

Head of Wells Fargo Auto
Wells Fargo
Tanya Sanders brings an engineer's approach to the way she runs Wells Fargo's auto division. 

Sanders, who studied mechanical engineering in college, began her career designing gas turbine and power plants at General Electric. She later shifted into finance at GE Capital, which had a large consumer lending portfolio at the time.

Read her full profile.
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Bonnie Lee

President and CEO
Hanmi Financial
One of the highlights of Bonnie Lee's career leading the $7.4 billion-asset Hanmi Financial was ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in December to celebrate the Los Angeles bank's 40th anniversary.

Read her full profile.
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Christina Mohr

Managing Director, Vice Chair of Global M&A
Citigroup
Amid a year of transformative changes in the M&A landscape and leadership shifts within the firm, Christina Mohr remained a stable force during Citi's volatile times. As the global head of mergers and acquisitions at Citi, she has championed a "client first" approach, which has become the cornerstone of her team's culture and a bedrock of their remarkable success.

Read her full profile.
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Kim-Thu Posnett

Head of Global Technology, Media and Telecom in Investment Banking
Goldman Sachs
Earlier this year, in a move to shore up the firm's client experience across all divisions, KimPosnett was appointed as Goldman's head of global technology, media and telecom investment banking. In her expanded role, Posnett, who has led more than 400 major tech deals over the last 20 years, will turn her attention to enhancing TMT's global strategy with a focus on strengthening client relationships while scaling her team's capabilities to service growing commercial opportunities.

Read her full profile.
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Krista Snelling

President and CEO
Santa Cruz County Bank
The community of Santa Cruz, California, likes to keep things local – even when it comes to banking.

Santa Cruz County Bank president and CEO Krista Snelling noted that her bank maintains a healthy share of the area's market, with 20% of deposits in the city of Santa Cruz and more than a 15% deposit market share in Santa Cruz County, making it fourth behind the big national banks like Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, said Snelling.

Read her full profile.
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Jeane Vidoni

President and CEO
Penn Community Bank
When Jeane Vidoni landed a job in 2006 at First Federal of Bucks County, the small mutual savings bank that would eventually become Penn Community Bank, she recalls that her mentors were skeptical.

Read her full profile.
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Kristy Fercho

Senior Executive Vice President, Head of Diverse Segments, Representation & Inclusion
Wells Fargo
Kristy Fercho wants everyone to know that Wells Fargo is serious about diversity and inclusion.

In May, Fercho became full-time head of diverse segments, representation & inclusion, a division of Wells Fargo that was launched in 2020. She replaced Kleiber Santos, who now heads the bank's consumer lending division.

Read her full profile.
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Julieann Thurlow

President and CEO
Reading Cooperative Bank
Reading Cooperative Bank in Massachusetts is nearing $1 billion in assets. Its 10 branches, all north of Boston, now stretch from the New Hampshire/Massachusetts border to the Atlantic Ocean. But even as the bank grows, president and CEO Julieann Thurlow is making a concerted effort to fortify ties to its communities.

Read her full profile.
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Lisa Oliver

President, CEO and Chair
The Cooperative Bank of Cape Cod
Lisa Oliver was in good company when she heard on a Friday morning in early March that the FDIC would be taking over Silicon Valley Bank. She was among fellow board members of the Massachusetts Bankers' Association, at a two-day strategic-planning offsite. "Obviously, we knew something pretty critical was en route, although it happened more quickly than we thought," she recalled.

Read her full profile.
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Kimberly Moore-Wright

Chief Teammate Officer and Head of Enterprise Diversity
Truist
Kimberly Moore-Wright has taken steps big and small to make Truist more employee friendly.

She successfully led a push to increase the Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender's minimum pay for workers from $15 to $22 an hour, which became company policy in October. The Truist chief teammate officer also facilitated an expansion of employee health benefits.

Read her full profile.
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Anne Clarke Wolff

Founder and CEO
Independence Point Advisors
Anne Clarke Wolff spent more than 30 years at global corporate and investment banks before starting her own firm.

She realized, in her most recent role at Bank of America in 2020, that she had seen more women in investment banking in 1989 when she started her career at Salomon Brothers than at any point since. 

"I couldn't see leaving the industry in worse shape than when I started," she said. "That was my call to action."

Read her full profile.
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Wendy Cai-Lee

Founder and CEO
Piermont Bank
Wendy Cai-Lee, founder and CEO of Piermont Bank, did not want to be a banker when she was growing up. But since 2019, when Cai-Lee founded the $557 million-asset bank headquartered in New York City, she's come to appreciate that she's pretty good at the job.

Read her full profile.
Editorial Staff
Most Powerful Women to Watch 2023 The Most Powerful Women in Banking 2023 Women in Banking
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