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The savings and loan crisis. The dot-com boom and bust. The Great Recession. The economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. In her 39 years in banking, there is little that Amy Brady hasn't confronted. The one constant in the life of KeyBank's former CIO: "Banking is always changing," she said.
After graduating with a liberal arts degree in 1987, Brady joined NationsBank in its management training program. "My Dad was in the steel industry and he had lost his job when I was in high school. I thought that banking would be a stable career," she recalled.
After starting as a banking center manager in Hillsborough County, Florida, Brady rose over the next 11 years to the role of consumer executive in1998 Palm Beach, Florida. She was responsible for the P&L of 150 banking centers with more than $5 billion in deposits, and oversaw a team of 3,000. It was a big job at an even bigger time: That same year, Charlotte-based NationsBank merged with San Francisco-based BankAmerica, creating a coast-to-coast national bank that was renamed Bank of America.
That combined heft meant even more prominent roles for Brady. In 2000, Ken Lewis, then-president of Bank of America and hell-bent on building the "bank of the future," asked Brady to move to Atlanta to lead the bank's first innovative enterprise research and development program. "I didn't know what that was, but he told me that I run a really successful region, and we need to figure out what the bank of the future is going to be."
Brady, her now-late husband Stan and their two young daughters moved from Boca Raton to Atlanta in 2000. Four years later, the bank hired a CIO for its consumer business and Brady was asked to move into technology, holding a series of roles and eventually becoming CIO, Enterprise Functions Technology & Operations. "I was hesitant to leave the business side, but then I realized that tech is business, much like wealth management or other lines of business," she said.
During her 11-year tenure, Brady modernized the technology underpinning Bank of America's most critical enterprise functions, including finance, risk, marketing, legal, audit and human resources. Her mandate grew significantly following BofA's acquisition of Merrill Lynch, when she led the complex integration of Merrill's wealth management and corporate portfolios into the bank's technology environment—helping bring two massive organizations onto a more unified technology foundation.
.Then Brady got a call from a headhunter suggesting she talk to KeyBank. "Once I met Beth Mooney, who was the first female CEO of a top-20 bank, I knew I had to take the job,'"she said. "Beth knew Key was behind on tech and that they needed to invest. And it was the opportunity to put all of the roles I'd had at BofA and put them into one role at Key."
The decision to become CIO of KeyBank was pivotal in her career. "It gave me the opportunity to work with an incredibly diverse and talented team. As we built, prototyped and tested new products, new branch designs and new technologies, what I learned was you cannot innovate if you surround yourself with people who look like you, think like you and have the same backgrounds as you. It is scientifically impossible," she said. "I have carried that lesson with me to every team I lead after that."
In her time at KeyBank, Brady focused on technology-led competitive growth, including spearheading the bank's enterprise migration to Google Cloud, the orchestration of a cross-functional data engineering initiative that generated $3 billion in net deposit growth during the 2023 regional bank liquidity crisis, and the creation of the Intelligent Automation Center of Excellence to capitalize on robotics process automation, machine learning and generative artificial intelligence deployments.
In 2024, Brady managed a $1.5 billion technology and operations expense budget and closed out the fiscal year $42 million favorable to budget without disrupting client-facing digital innovations, according to American Banker.
On Amy's career, Mooney, who retired as CEO of KeyBank in 2020, said it's "a reminder that leadership isn't measured only by the positions you hold. It's measured by how you grow through change, how you help others grow along the way, and the impact you leave on your organization and your community."
Brady left KeyBank in March 2026 for personal reasons, and after a brief pause, decided to take on another new challenge. On September 1, Brady joined MAI Capital Management as a managing partner. Her new role has two broad priorities: firmwide, she's overseeing AI optimization and workflow improvements, and externally, she's the nation leader of MAI's women and wealth strategy." Women are becoming the most important forces in wealth management. I'm excited to help grow MAI and also be focused on the unique needs of women," she said.
Mooney, meanwhile, is not surprised that Brady isn't content to retire after nearly 40 years in the industry, noting "that growth rarely comes from comfort. Many of our greatest lessons come from taking on difficult assignments and navigating uncertainty."
Brady advises her younger counterparts that while technology may be changing how work is performed, the fundamentals of the job remain the same. "You have to know the business. You have to know how your bank works to create value. You need to be agile and you need to be continually learning," she said.
One final piece of advice: "Don't be afraid to take a role you didn't expect."
