The Most Powerful Women in Banking, #11, Bridget Engle, Wells Fargo

In three decades driving technology change in the financial industry, Wells Fargo Senior EVP and Head of Technology Bridget Engle has had to adapt quickly, whether to big crises — think 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic — or routine business challenges posed by innovation.

In the aftermath of 9/11, she was part of an IT/operations team at Lehman Brothers that improvised a dynamic virtual private network and a makeshift voice over internet protocol switchboard for clients after the firm lost its data center when the North Tower collapsed. As CIO and head of engineering at BNY Mellon, she spearheaded a rapid transition to remote work for thousands of staff during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And then there are the routine business risks posed by innovation. In April, banks had to contend with new cybersecurity threats from Anthropic's then-unreleased Claude Mythos AI model, prompting emergency meetings between regulators and national banks. "The absolute assertion is this is the real deal," Engle said of the Mythos incident. "It truly did find new, novel techniques" for exploitation.

"I tend to be, [in] retrospect, a bit of a crisis junkie in getting after these problems," Engle said.

Before joining Wells Fargo in August 2024, Engle, in various senior tech roles, has been a key architect of the technological backbones of some of Wall Street's biggest institutions — Lehman Brothers, BNY Mellon, Barclays Capital, Bank of America and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation. 

At Wells, she now leads a department with a $10 billion-plus annual budget and a global technology team of 30,000 professionals. The bank is accelerating its cloud-based data center expansion, in part to support transformative AI work that has extended AI tools to nearly 200,000 Wells Fargo employees. "Last year we had baked in a fair amount of productivity already into our software engineering work, and we've seen that like more than double in terms of the productivity," said Engle, who holds two pending patent applications for generative AI technology filed this year.

Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf noted in a CNBC appearance last October that AI has produced 30% to 35% greater productivity for software developers at Wells Fargo.

Focused on building technological excellence and operational resilience, Engle's work also spans customer-facing initiatives. She led the rollout of a digital account-opening feature across Wells Fargo's roughly 4,000 branches, which cut onboarding times by 60%. The bank's AI-powered virtual assistant, launched four years ago, has surpassed 1 billion interactions. She also managed the successful migration of the Federal Reserve's interbank messaging system to the ISO 20022 standard last July.