The Latest from Women in Banking

A lot of what Cathy Bessant knows about directing a team can be traced back to her days as patrol leader of her Girl Scouts troop.

Avid Modjtabai's big job at Wells Fargo got even bigger this year when she took on responsibility for the company's operations group and added its 10,000 employees to the 55,000 she already oversaw.

Innovation — whether nurturing it internally or keeping up with it externally — is of the highest priority for Diane Reyes. In keeping with that objective, she oversaw the launch of a fintech innovation lab in Singapore last fall.

Sandie O'Connor is at the forefront of high-level policy discussions currently shaping the banking industry.

As chief operating officer at Northern Trust, Jana Schreuder is ensuring that the Chicago custody bank stays on the cutting edge of innovation.

Even with more than 250,000 applicants for its summer program and analyst classes each year, Goldman Sachs questioned whether it was doing enough to foster diversity in the pool of hopefuls. That's why Edith Cooper, its global head of human capital management, is leading an effort to refine the way it finds talent.

Rebecca Patterson might be a financial expert who journalists at CNBC and other news outlets seek out for commentary, but it wasn't so long ago that she was on the other side of the interview.

For the past four years Suni Harford has been co-chair of Citi Women, a global women's career-track initiative that involves more than 130,000 female employees.

Though some other investment banks have scaled back equity research efforts in recent times, Joyce Chang has successfully led continued investment and expansion at J.P. Morgan.

Candace Browning has two very important roles at Bank of America Merrill Lynch — both related to research. Not only does she oversee research for the investment bank, she also spearheads some of its work to evaluate innovative fintech startups.