Kerry White’s banking career began in 2012 on the trading floor at Citigroup. A native of Northern New Jersey, White had recently graduated from Harvard University and said she found herself “enamored with the concept of seeing the world unfold” from the perspective of the trading floor.

She was also drawn to the idea of building an international career, and Citi — one of the world’s largest banks with on-the-ground operations in 95 countries — could provide that opportunity.

Natalie Wech isn’t the banker one would expect to meet when walking into a branch of M&T Bank in southern Pennsylvania. The Zimbabwean native, who grew up spending summers visiting family in Greece, speaks five languages and had a previous stint as a professional ballerina before coming to the U.S. for university “to experience a different continent,” she said. 

As a student at Penn State, where she earned undergraduate and MBA degrees, Wech met Michael Murchie, an M&T regional executive who has since retired, at a student event. He convinced her that rather than leaving the U.S. after graduation, she should join the bank’s development program.

An employee benefit event at Synovus helped lead Willette Shalishali down her current career path. 

Shalishali joined the Columbus, Georgia-based bank after meeting with a recruiter at her alma mater, the University of Georgia. “I am originally from Columbus, Georgia, and it had this respected vibe in my head,” she said of Synovus. “I thought maybe I should move home for a little bit.” 

The biggest initial public offering of 2023 — chipmaker ARM’s September debut on Nasdaq, which valued the U.K.-based company at $54.5 billion — marked a memorable day for investment banker Jessica Payne, who advised ARM on the deal. 

“Going down to the stock exchange, watching it happen live, going out into Times Square and taking all the photos, all the hype around it,” she recalled. “It was a really great day.” 

The Flint, Michigan, native was recruited out of Michigan State University to work at what was then GMAC, an arm of General Motors. The entry-level job in planning and analysis looked interesting for a finance major, especially in 2008, when the global financial crisis was taking hold. “It was an interesting time to be entering the workforce,” she recalled of her time in the Detroit office.

The following year, as the bank was rebranding to Ally, Niemczyk moved to the bank’s office in Charlotte, North Carolina, a place where she didn’t know anyone. “I view that time in my career as an excellent foundation that has served me really well over the years in terms of learning the basics, building blocks and fundamentals and economics of a consumer business and what the value drivers are,” she said.

In 2007, Majdouline Melhaoui was finishing a master’s degree in finance in France when the subprime mortgage crisis hit. “It was getting a lot of attention, especially in response to its impact on the economy, so I was really interested to understand more about the interconnectivity, between banks and the financial market and the economy in general,” she said.

Melhaoui was required to take a 12-month internship in order to finish her master’s and ended up interning in the liquidity department at a French bank. She fell in love with liquidity, and when she graduated, she went to work for BNP Paribas as a liquidity analyst.

Jo Jagadish’s experience running a microbusiness where she created custom invitations for weddings, bar mitzvahs and birthdays has fed into her dual role as head of U.S. digital banking and corporate products and services at TD Bank, a subsidiary of Toronto-based TD Bank Group.

“You are the CEO, the chief marketing officer, the chief technology officer and the chief financial officer,” said Jagadish. “You’re focused on growing your business but the tools you needed to run it were not that easy to find.”

Natalie Flanders started her banking career at First Horizon as an intern. During her senior year in college, she took classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to be able to work full days on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. “I started my time here in 2009, which was a pretty terrible time to get started in banking. But it weirdly turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I learned so much by starting in the middle of a financial crisis,” she said.

Layna Dupuis started in banking as a high schooler. “I was an incoming junior,” Dupuis said. “I wanted to work. I needed to work. I come from a hardworking family. As soon as we can work, we work,” she said.

Fortunately for Dupuis, who had been passed over by two other prospective employers, her mother had a friend at the community bank in nearby Idabel, Oklahoma, who agreed to hire her. It didn’t take long for the 16-year-old to realize she had a talent for what she termed “the service side” of banking.

Fixed income is at the center of the economy, and Amanda Deckelman sees her job as crucial to the market’s functioning. 

“How the government funds itself through the Treasury market is critical to how people live,” she said. It’s one part of how central Wall Street is to the American economy: “People’s retirement savings, pensions — it’s at the heart of where everyone’s savings and wealth originates.”