Professional development

As summer nears its end, finance-industry rookies are relishing their freedom while some fret over what it means for their future careers. Anxiety is simmering in Wall Street's kinder era for incomers, according to interviews with 10 young bankers.

A career path in financial services doesn't have to be linear, says Walmart's Julia Unger.

For women, the path to leadership isn't always the same one that men take. Talus Pay CEO Kim Fitzsimmons says her career moved fastest whenever she refused to stay in her lane.

While millions of employees have voluntarily left their jobs over the past year, senior level industry leaders have continued to advance their careers.

Spence, who joined the Cincinnati bank in 2015, will succeed Greg Carmichael as chief executive in July. He says he’ll maintain the company’s current strategic priorities, including regional expansion and digital transformation.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is managing a shortage of tech workers by training its developers in high-demand technologies including blockchain and Microsoft Azure, betting that such growth opportunities will help the lender retain current workers and attract outside talent. 

Chryssa Halley, who has been with the company since 2006, was named CFO and Jim Holmberg was named controller.

Liz Wolverton, previously the Georgia bank’s chief strategy and customer experience officer, will oversee its branch network, consumer products, marketing and more.

The card network chose the majority-Black city as the site of its new operations center in part to improve the racial makeup of its workforce and create a new path to leadership for minorities.

From paying for lawn care when an Army Reservist on staff was deployed to offering employees office space and laptops for their children to do school work, United Bank in Alabama aims to make life easier for the people who work there. It is also ramping up internal training programs.

The California bank is directing $30 million to Stride Funding, a provider of flexible student-payment options, to finance deferred tuition for participants in a technology upskilling program.

The bank is giving virtual reality headsets to branch employees, which they'll use to practice conversations in private before they happen in real life.

Marquette University has formed a partnership that will give undergraduate business students experience working with grassroots lenders in Panama, Honduras and Nicaragua. The goal is not only to teach the basics of commercial lending, but also to instill some idealism in the next generation of bankers.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is soliciting feedback on banks' experiences with remote exams during the pandemic. Some welcome the review as a step toward a more modern examination system, while others contend the last year and a half exposed the drawbacks of long-distance oversight.

The agency asked bankers to reflect on their experience with virtual monitoring over the past year amid speculation that the pandemic could speed a full conversion to off-site supervision.

The company, which is phasing out positions in areas including mainframe computing and lockbox operations, is offering employees 10 hours of instruction per quarter to learn how to manage bots and develop other new skills, Chief Information Officer Amy Brady says.

Michael Hsu is reorganizing the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency so that he directly oversees staffers who develop examination strategy. Some analysts suggest the move could result in more aggressive oversight by an agency long accused of being too cozy with national banks.

Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and United Wholesale Mortgage are among the financial companies teaching employees and recruits technology skills to take on new roles and get better in their current ones.

Companies from Bank of America to PlainsCapital have ditched dull webinars and found more engaging ways to train workers to show empathy to clients and explain bank programs.

Citigroup has started an early intake program in Asia to boost the hiring of women in its investment banking and markets businesses.