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."
That reality was painfully apparent on June 30, 2025, when Ferris gave birth to her second son, who was born prematurely and gravely ill. The baby died six days later. In the days in between those two life events, Ferris was named to American Banker's The Most Powerful Women in Banking NEXT ranking, the timing of which underscores the unpredictability of life. "I was sitting in this moment in time where I had this amazing recognition for my professional career, and I couldn't have felt more powerless in my personal life," she recalled.
Ferris said the loss completely changed her perspective on being the COO of Capstone and "on being a people leader."
Prior to Captone, she was a client-facing VP at Headwaters, a boutique investment bank in Denver, when the founder needed help selling the firm. Ferris wrote the confidential memorandum that would lead to the sale of her employer to Capstone in 2018—just eight years after she started as an intern.
That's when she realized she preferred strategy to dealmaking."The client work, the deal work—everyone chases that. It's fun, it fuels you," she admitted. "I became good at articulating the strategic growth potential of a company, measuring it and [sharing that with] key stakeholders. So I think that's what helped me excel."
That was the first of three acquisitions Ferris would shepherd. She credits her early start at Headwaters with giving her a unique perspective about how management could convey a strategic vision, what her colleagues cared about, and how the firm's messaging landed with them.
In 2022, she watched carefully when Huntington Bancshares bought Capstone, folding the boutique into a publicly traded regional bank. By January 2023, Huntington named her Capstone's COO, putting her in charge of the systems behind the firm's strategy.
One of her first projects was turning Capstone's CRM from a contact database into what she calls a real enterprise management tool. "Very few middle-market investment banks and privately held ones actually had insights on their own business," Ferris said.
She again leaned into her habit of listening closely, formalizing the practice of recording every client and prospect conversation so the firm could spot or confirm larger trends.
Ferris led the integration when Capstone and Huntington completed the acquisition of TM Capital, as well as additional practice groups from Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in 2025. What's notable about the TM Capital-Janney deal is that it delivered "a strategically important transaction at a time when many deals failed to reach the finish line," she said. (Capstone now ranks among the top 10 U.S. middle-market investment banks, according to FactSet data and Capstone's internal deal records.)
Living through and teeing up new acquisitions has prompted Ferris to lead differently now. "It's taught me patience, listening...and taking time to just let things breathe," she said.
The deal expanded Capstone's headcount by roughly 40% and, for the first time, gave it real reach into private equity clients. Capstone's engagement volume grew 6% in 2025, when the industry average was just 0.3%. It also now has the operational capacity "to drive a 30–50% increase in closed deal volume with minimal execution risk," Ferris said, supported by the operating rigor and scalability she introduced. In the first quarter of 2026, the company posted 25 closings.
Capstone set a 90% retention target for the incoming TM Capital and Janney employees, but eight months in, Ferris put the real number closer to 80%. That's a 10-point miss, but even the best integration plans, she said, can be unpredictable.
Coming to terms with that unpredictability "has put me on a new trajectory for the type of leader I am this year," she added, "and the one I hope to be in the future."
