The Most Powerful Women in Banking's Life Time Achievement Award: Julie Monaco

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As a kid growing up in the '70s, Julie Monaco never imagined being a banker. A regular at model UN competitions, she pictured a career with the State Department or maybe the United Nations. Fortunately for Citigroup , Monaco discovered banking. Following a path shaped by friends, mentors and bosses—and at least one fortuitous encounter—she landed in a position tailor-made for her skills and passions.

In July, after a 40-year career, Monaco stepped down as managing director and global head of Citi's public sector banking, a unit she started in 2013 to support the company's country and regional heads in their work with government finance ministries, central banks and other sovereign entities.

It's the kind of thing only Citi, with its product heft and global network, could pull off, and Monaco feels lucky to have found her way to the job. "The last 12 years of my career at Citi couldn't have been a better way to end things," she says. "Working with all these different countries and trying to understand their unique challenges was absolutely what I wanted to do since I was 13."

While public sector banking doesn't have a line on the income statement, the business it helps generate is felt across the organization, from investment banking and payments to lending. "Julie has woven a lasting thread through the very fabric of Citi's ongoing success," said CEO Jane Fraser. "She was the banker who actually got things done."

Fraser recalls watching Monaco counsel finance ministers on currency strategies or digitizing governments. "In a business that can be demanding and high-pressure…she absolutely thrived." In-house, Monaco led with "candor and courage," challenging leaders and encouraging employees to do the same, Fraser added.

Monaco entered George Washington University intent on going the foreign service route, but in her senior year decided to explore alternatives. A friend suggested she take a global banking course, and it was like lightning struck. "I realized how banking facilitates everything that happens on the global stage," she recalled.

Monaco landed a job in cash management and trade finance at Bankers Trust in 1985. The world was globalizing, and she was regularly dispatched to foreign capitals to help set up SWIFT payment terminals and more as her responsibilities grew. In 1999, she jumped to JPMorganChase and was happy as a managing director for foreign exchange until fate struck.

In 2006, Paul Galant, CEO of Citi's transaction services, had been pursuing Monaco about a job and getting nowhere. By chance, the two found themselves on the same flight from Tokyo to New York and started talking. "I tried to not interview her, just have a rapport," Galant said of the in-flight conversation. "She began talking about the industry's challenges and opportunities and how women fit. … I was impressed by her energy and vision."

Monaco excelled as Citi's head of North American global transaction services. "She established a brand with clients—the Julie Monaco brand," defined by integrity, sincerity and independent thinking, Galant said.

In 2013, she was tasked with building the public-sector banking business. "Part of the remit was to get better coordinated globally" and streamline governments' access to Citi's strategic solutions and services, said Raymond McGuire, Monaco's boss for much of her time at Citi and now president of Lazard. "Julie had the substance, experience and attention to detail that the job required."

Today, the group works with 149 governments, playing point on big projects like providing custody services for central bank assets, selling state-owned enterprises or helping modernize national payments and financial systems.

"When you help a government raise capital or restructure its debt, you're improving the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of people in that country, not just one company," Monaco said.

For Monaco, that's the legacy: Doing important work on a global stage and proving her group's value. "Twelve years ago, a lot of people questioned why we even had a public sector team," she said. "Today, everyone understands its value."

Not bad for someone who never intended to be a banker.