The Most Powerful Women to Watch, No. 5, Christiana Riley, Santander U.S.

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In college, Christiana Riley was a French and Italian major who loved all things international.

So when an opportunity arose after graduation to work for a New York City-based company with multinational clients, she took it. It didn't matter that the job was an analyst role at the boutique investment bank Greenhill or that her background was in Romance languages.

"I'm the accidental banker," Riley told American Banker. "But my real passion and the reason I was driven toward banking … was because of the truly global nature of this industry."

Riley's 25-year career in banking has been largely spent abroad. About a year after she took the job at Greenhill, she agreed to be transferred to its new office in Frankfurt, Germany. Two years later, she moved to London to earn an MBA at London Business School and then worked for a couple of years as a consultant at McKinsey. In 2006, she decided she'd rather be more directly involved in strategy, so she joined Deutsche Bank as a corporate development associate.

Riley wound up staying at Deutsche for 17 years, during which the German bank experienced great tumult. In 2019, she came back to the United States to help restructure and simplify Deutsche's U.S. business.

In early 2023, a new opportunity grabbed her attention. Banco Santander , the Spanish banking giant, had laid out plans to achieve stronger growth and profitability, largely by leveraging the firm's global scale and business diversification. The U.S. market was a big factor in the broader strategy.

Riley was drawn to the opportunity to help build a bank rather than scale one back. So that fall, she joined Santander as the regional head of its North America operations, in charge of the bank's U.S. and Mexico businesses. Earlier this year, she was named president and CEO of Santander U.S. as part of a restructuring plan to move away from regional reporting and regional leaders. (Riley was ranked on this year's list for her 2024 title of regional head.)

"It wasn't an easy decision" to leave Deutsche, but "in retrospect it's turned out to be absolutely the best decision I've made in my career," Riley said. Still, "it's not easy to leave a place where you have a 17-18-year track record and … where you have relationship capital."

Two years into Santander's broader growth plan, its U.S. arm is generating revenue, building capital, meeting its financial targets and "continuing to fire on all cylinders," Riley said. Openbank, the digital bank that Santander launched in the U.S. in October 2024, has crossed $5 billion in deposits, helping to fund the bank's sizable auto loan book.

Riley, the mother of two teenagers, said she encourages Santander's interns and new analysts to find more ways to say "yes" to opportunities, even if those opportunities don't seem like "the perfect fit."

"If you're prepared to grab them, there's a lot of fun to be had," she said.