Denise Davis describes herself as “a numbers nerd,” who fell in love with banking after an internship at PNC Bank while attending the University of Pittsburgh. 

After a dozen years with the bank, Davis is now a managing director and senior relationship manager within PNC Bank’s energy group, which ranks among the top revenue-generating businesses for the bank with more than $3 billion of deployed capital and a portfolio of dozens of clients. 

Megan Comfort got into banking on the advice of her mother. Comfort’s mother, an immigrant from the Philippines, worked as a bank teller for most of Comfort’s childhood, and urged her daughter to go into banking because of the benefits and the opportunity to try different roles.

Immediately after high school, Comfort began working as a teller at Nevada State Bank, a subsidiary of Zions Bancorp. Three years later, she joined the small-business banking team at the bank. “That’s when I fell in love with banking. I loved helping small-business owners,” she said. 

Jillian Chuck has learned about providing a high-touch customer experience through an unusual avenue — by working in her parents’ Jamaican restaurant. 

Food is what initially brought her parents together. Chuck’s father immigrated to the U.S. to attend school and met her mother, who was working in his uncle’s bakery. 

Growing up in the small Illinois town of Roscoe, Amy Bartlett never imagined that she would go into banking. Today, she holds BMO’s House Discretionary Limit, which means she is one of a handful at the bank allowed to recommend that the CEO or chief risk officer extend more than the bank’s maximum credit limit to a client. 

Bartlett joined BMO in 2007 as an analyst working with large diversified companies, and has stayed at the bank since in its Chicago office, now also supervising bankers in Toronto and New York.

Shayna Arrington always knew she was going to work in finance. She earned an MBA with a concentration in finance from the University of Buffalo School of Management, and then earned a law degree with a concentration in financial transactions from the University of Buffalo School of Law.

During law school, Arrington spent her summers interning in Washington, D.C., for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice in their enforcement divisions.