Kathleen Sherwood may be a rarity among her former college classmates. The Macon, Georgia, native has spent her entire career at the same company.

Following her 2009 graduation from the University of Georgia, where she majored in finance and art history, Sherwood started in the leadership development program at BB&T Corp. She was sent to Cleveland, Tennessee, where she trained as a commercial banker at a time when the industry was recovering from the financial crisis.

Tim Spence, chairman, president and CEO of Fifth Third Bank, refers to Fifth Third executive Jessie Rohrkemper as a “utility infielder.” 

In baseball, a utility infielder adeptly plays second base, third base and shortstop, and sometimes other positions. As it relates to Rohrkemper’s work at the bank, her “utility infielder” status enables her to tackle problems and unearth opportunities across the bank, colleagues say.

“I think with the engineering mindset that I have, I really thrive between strategy and execution, and I really thrive with complex problems and ambiguity, and being able to break those down into the simplest parts in order to solve a problem,” she said.

As head of asset liability management for U.S. Bank, part of Hannah Honeycutt’s job is to challenge the bank’s business line leaders. They want to deploy the bank’s capital for loans; she wants to make sure the capital is allocated to the right kind of loans. 

“What we’re really working with the business to understand is: When we create that loan, are we getting a return that’s worth our capital?” said Honeycutt, a senior vice president and balance sheet management executive for the bank.

BNP Paribas has the fastest growing cash equities business on the street and an unlikely candidate is leading it. 

Lindsay Levine, 36 years old, a classical studies major and history buff, wasn’t that good at math in school, she recalled. Now she’s the managing director and co-head of cross channel sales trading for the Paris-based multinational bank. 

How did she get here? A summer internship at Goldman Sachs where she fell in love with the trading floor energy.

Embedded finance and real-time payments are two of the most important trends in banking, creating a need for a vision that connects emerging technology to specific business strategies.

“Embedded finance is the only way to go,”  Tessa Naroditsky, SVP and director of payments strategy for Comerica Bank, told American Banker. “It’s how you create value.”

Naroditsky is leading initiatives that combine how faster payment processing improves the bank’s delivery of products through partners, the essence of what’s referred to as embedded banking.

Wenni Wu, chief growth officer at Piermont Bank, speaks English, Mandarin and Cantonese fluently. Her language skills and cultural background—Wu was born in the U.S. and is a descendant of the Teochow Chinese community—helped land her first post-college position as a cross-border investment advisor for Chinese companies.

“It was back in the early 2010s, when there was a significant amount of [Chinese] investment into the real estate market in the U.S.,” she recalled. One of the Chinese CEOs she worked with gave Wu a piece of advice that still resonates today. “He said that if you choose the right platform, it can elevate your skill. But if you choose the right people, you can build your own platform.

Spending one’s entire career at a single company—a “lifer,” so to speak—can have complicated consequences. Is the experience and deep dive one gets enough to overcome feelings of insecurity around knowledge of the industry and the “real world”? If you ask Ally’s Cindy Balint, executive director of consumer credit operations, it all comes down to a focus on the customer.

“Of course, I have the fear that I am not up to speed on everything because I’ve spent so much time at Ally, and prior to that GMAC. [GMAC rebranded as Ally Financial in May 2010.] But I know if I focus on the customer—who I make sure I interact with on a daily basis—that’s what keeps me grounded.”

Jessica Carta is a self-described “payments geek”. As the senior vice president for consumer and small business payments, Carta leads all digital consumer and small business payment initiatives across the bank. Prior to joining Citizens, she worked at Mastercard and built payment products at two different fintechs. 

“Payments and money movement touch every part of our day, every part of our ecosystem,” Carta said. “I particularly love the consumer angle because I’m a consumer, you’re a consumer. We can all understand and relate to it.”

Even in the midst of market volatility, Capstone Partners executive Olivia Ferris helped the investment banking and advisory services firm achieve a 6% increase in engagements and a 17% increase in closings last year compared with 2023.

Ferris credits the leadership team’s “management as a service” philosophy — a philosophy trumpeted by Capstone founder and CEO John Ferrara — for last year’s boost in engagement and closings.

Ali Mattera considers her professional journey to be in banking a “Cinderella story.”

“I started, like most amazing success stories, in college as a teller,” Mattera told American Banker.

Her initial jobs at smaller banks gave her the opportunity to experience multiple facets of banking operations early on in her career.

“I had the ability to have my hand in a little bit of everything, so I had exposure to retail, compliance, BSA, and technology,” she said. “For me, taking a natural interest in all things technology, I definitely saw that as the fastest path for me to have a seat at the table.”