The Most Powerful Women in Banking

The uplifting story of another Virginia statue — this one honoring the first black female to charter a bank — is well-timed. Plus, JPMorgan Chase's O'Connor on laboring over Libor and U.S. Bank's Lawler on getting people to do the right thing.

The Swiss bank got involved in microfinance in a counterintuitive way: at the behest of its wealthiest clients. Technology has made lending in small rural villages more efficient and profitable.

Beverly Anderson, who had held the job on an interim basis since March, leads a unit that has been roiled by the bank's unauthorized-accounts scandal.

A recent tribute to Maggie Walker came more than a century after she founded St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Va. But it fittingly coincided with the first anniversary of the #BankBlack movement and offers a counterweight to the racial strife that just occurred less than 100 miles away in Charlottesville.

Sanger is out at Wells Fargo and so it is a crisis that gives us our first female board chair at a major U.S. bank. Women lead two major tech initiatives at JPMorgan Chase, which is also adding a fourth woman to its executive committee.