The Latest from Women in Banking

You learn a lot about how Paula Polito got to where she is — overseeing four businesses with $160 billion of assets — by asking how she landed her first job.

Amy Carlson had to make a tough call last year about a business she had spent the three previous years building: whether to scale it back, hold steady or keep investing.

Dawn Fitzpatrick understands the importance of bench strength. When asked to name a significant management decision in the past year, she cited hiring her successor after being promoted.

Fiona Bassett moved to New York with a mandate of making Deutsche Bank one of the top exchange-traded fund issuers in the United States. Since her arrival in 2014, she's done just that.

In 2012, BNP Paribas was the largest global custodian without a presence in North America and it wanted to change that. It found its leader in Claudine Gallagher, then the global head of depositary receipts at J.P. Morgan. Four years later, le succés.

Karen Peetz has myriad responsibilities as president of the world's largest custody bank, not the least of which is managing relationships with Bank of New York Mellon's 500 largest clients.

During American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking gala last year, Marianne Lake laid out the "30-5-1" challenge: each week, spend 30 minutes having coffee with a talented junior woman, five minutes congratulating a woman on a recent success and one minute talking up that woman to another senior peer.

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.