Hope Dmuchowski, the chief financial officer of First Horizon Bank, got into banking largely due to a chance encounter.
When she was a junior in college, her hometown of Bound Brook, New Jersey flooded, so she volunteered to help with the cleanup. A Deutsche bank executive was also volunteering and he was struck by her leadership skills.
He offered her a summer internship with the bank, but she initially turned him down. "I had three jobs lined up for the summer. I was waitressing. I was lifeguarding, and I was a full time nanny. And I wasn't interested in getting on the train every morning for a long commute to New York from where I lived."
The Deutsche exec countered that he could pay her $25 an hour. "I'm working three jobs and if you added them all together, I don't think I was making $25 an hour," she said. " And that was the number one reason I took it."
By the end of the summer, the bank had asked Dmuchowski to continue working two days a week and after she graduated, she joined Deutsche's leadership development program.
Dmuchowski spent the first two months of Deutsche Bank's two-year long leadership program in London. She and the other 500 global trainees were in London when the attacks on 9/11 occurred. At the time, the U.S. headquarters of Deutsche bank was adjacent to the World Trade Center, so Dmuchowski and her fellow U.S. trainees were stuck in England. They spent an additional two months working there before returning home. (Although the building hadn't been damaged in the attack, due to extensive contamination, the bank decided to tear the building down.)
She spent six years at Deutsche Bank, and her final position there was as a business manager for equity and global markets research. "It's similar to what a chief operating officer does today," she said. Dmuchowski was responsible for the budget for multiple countries, reviewing the work of the analysts and ensuring that the materials had been approved before publishing, while also working on compliance issues with the operations team.
She joined Winston Salem-based BB&T in 2007 as a financial reporting manager, and over the next 10 years, worked her way up the ranks until she was named Group CFO in July 2017. In late 2019, BB&T and SunTrust Banks went through a merger of equals and became Truist.
Dmuchowski stayed on as group CFO for two years before decamping in November 2021 to Memphis-based First Horizon as its CFO. She has seven direct reports and manages a team of 250. In addition to the traditional finance teams she oversees including accounting and investor relations, she's also responsible for the bank's corporate buildings and facilities.
About 60 days into her new job, Toronto Dominion entered into an acquisition agreement to buy First Horizon. Dmuchowski spent the next 15 months preparing for the merger, only for it to be called off in May of 2023. "The regulators said that we were not going to get approval this year, unlikely to get approval next year, and that it was not happening anytime soon. So we mutually agreed to terminate the agreement," she said.
Humble beginnings
Dmuchowski and her two siblings were raised by a single mother. The experience shaped her worldview and her work ethic. "It really showed me at a very, very young age, that my bills are paid by someone who's working. I think sometimes when you're raised in a middle class household, the money's just there. And so for me, we were always talking about budgeting. We're talking about how much money we had for groceries, how we're saving for vacation, and so it was really front of mind for me growing up."
She worked two jobs in high school and up to four jobs in college before she landed the Deutsche Bank internship. "When people asked me why I had so many jobs, I thought, 'how else was I going to pay for college?' It never dawned on me to take out hundreds of thousands in student loans. I wasn't raised that way. My mom never had a mortgage. We never had a car at certain times growing up, so it didn't dawn on me to not work to pay for college."
When Dmuchowski started college, she planned on being a teacher because, at the time and in her community, women were either teachers or nurses. However, when she started taking business classes and a class in industrial psychology, she changed course and got a B.A. in psychology with a minor in business.
Today, she said that she's passionate about sharing her story with other women who might not see anyone who resembles them in the workplace. "I hope that women from every background can see themselves in my seat one day. You don't have to come from the best prep schools, the best colleges. And you don't have to look the part; you can get here by working hard," she said.
On being a leader
Dmuchowski, one of the few female CFOs of a large U.S. bank, said that leading with authenticity and kindness are the most important characteristics for her. It's important, she said, to provide an environment where people can learn, grow and feel supported to try different ideas without worrying about negative consequences from making mistakes.
"I call it failing forward. We have a failure, so how do we move forward? How do we learn from it? How do we make sure that we never repeat the same mistake twice?"
To address those questions, she implemented something she calls a "game tape review." Much as a football team would do after a loss, Dmuchowski sits down with her team members and they review what went wrong and how they might correct it going forward. She also does a team review when a project goes right.
Changes to the industry
A more intentional focus in the banking sector on getting women into leadership positions is one of the biggest changes Dmuchowski has seen in the last 20 years. "Not just within a company, but also having female board members who look at the ranks to see how many women are on the executive team," she explained.
However, she says, there is still some unintentional bias or sexism towards women within the industry. Dmuchowski recalled the story of a female trader who spoke at The Most Powerful Women in Banking
While Dmuchowski adds that overt bad behavior of that kind is rare nowadays, it is still challenging for women to get ahead — and even stay — in the industry. "We're still losing women in the middle rungs. They're leaving 10 years in and so I worry about the fact that we're not increasing the number of women at every single rung," she said.
And while the industry has made "significant progress" in the last decade to get women into the C-suite, Dmuchowski thinks it's important to keep the intentionality of promoting women going forward. "We need to keep that momentum up and make sure the younger generations that are coming through are being promoted, and that they have the support around them to keep working within our industry," she said.
