Racquel Oden‘s role spans two of HSBC’s most strategically important businesses: she serves as U.S. head of international wealth and premier banking and U.S. head of global private banking. 

Since joining HSBC in 2023, Oden has been instrumental in driving the bank’s strategy to expand its wealth business in the U.S., which is a key growth market within the bank’s global portfolio. 

Achieving these goals at a tumultuous time for markets and geopolitics brings its own set of challenges, as HSBC’s wealth and private banking serves  20 million clients worldwide.

“With a client base that is globally minded, my biggest challenge today is ensuring that we are providing the same world-class advice that our clients have come to expect in a world that is constantly changing and evolving,” Oden said. “The news headlines have moved so rapidly this year, it’s our responsibility as wealth advisors to anticipate what’s around the corner and deliver tailored advice in a personal way — all at once.” 

Solita Marcelli is Global Head of Investment Management for UBS GWM. In this capacity, she leads an organization dedicated to delivering world-class investment solutions tailored to client needs across the Americas, APAC, EMEA, and Switzerland. Solita oversees the full suite of discretionary, advisory, and investment fund offerings globally—which account for over USD 2 trillion in client assets.

Previously, Solita served as Chief Investment Officer Americas for UBS Global Wealth Management, where most recently she led both the CIO Research and Investment Solutions businesses in the region. Prior to UBS, Solita was the Global Head of Fixed Income, Currencies, and Commodities (FICC) for Wealth Management at J.P. Morgan.

Solita is widely recognized as a thought leader in the industry and is featured frequently in the financial media. In 2024 and 2025, she was recognized as one of the 100 most influential women in US Finance by Barron’s. Outside of UBS, she currently serves on the Board of the UJA Federation of New York and was the 2022 recipient of UJA’s Alan C. Greenberg Leadership Award. She is a fellow of the 2018 Class of the Finance Leaders Fellowship and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

Solita holds an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University and a BA in Economics and History from Brandeis University. Solita grew up in Istanbul, Turkey and now resides in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Meghan Shue is responsible for helping manage the end-to-end asset allocation process, developing market research, and communicating the investment team’s market outlook and positioning to clients and prospective clients. She is a member of the Investment Committee, which is responsible for deriving the firm’s strategic and tactical asset allocation positioning. 

Meghan also oversees the firm’s portfolio construction process — including implementation of asset class views through a variety of proprietary, non-proprietary, passive, active, and factor-based solutions — and chairs the Portfolio Management Committee.

Prior to joining Wilmington Trust, Meghan was an investment strategist at Bessemer Trust, where she helped manage the asset allocation decision and implementation process, performed asset allocation and market research, and published pertinent thought leadership.

She holds an MBA with a concentration in finance from the University of Miami, where she was valedictorian of her graduating class. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering, with a concentration in operations research and financial engineering, from Princeton University, where she was also captain of the swimming & diving team. 

Meghan is a regular CNBC contributor and is frequently quoted in financial media communicating the firm’s economic and market views. She was also named to American Banker’s 2022 Most Powerful Women in Banking: NEXT list.

Under Candace Browning’s leadership, Bank of America’s global research team has continued to do what it does best: collaborating with colleagues across regions and asset classes to bring clients thoughtful, timely insights.

Suni Harford was handed one of the most challenging tasks of her career in early 2023 when UBS took over the ailing Credit Suisse in a $3.2 billion deal brokered by the Swiss government.

As businesses increasingly employ artificial intelligence (AI), Ann Fogarty is studying agentic AI through a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) course, to learn how to write prompts and otherwise optimize its use. 

“I want to really understand the opportunities there,” she said.

Fogarty leads the global delivery of State Street’s investment services, the firm’s largest business unit. In July 2025, she was appointed chief operating officer of investment services, with a remit to align expertise from across State Street to address challenges and develop solutions. (American Banker’s methodology requires that a woman be in her role for at least one year, so Fogarty is ranked based on her performance as head of global delivery, not her current position as COO of investment services.)

Over the past year, world events including the ongoing strife between Russia and Ukraine and daily dispatches from the Israel-Hamas war in the Middle East have increasingly shaped the investment bank’s debt offerings and bond issuance. But even in this chaotic environment shaped by “geo-political unrest, market-moving elections, and central bank pivots,” Barbara Mariniello, global co-head of debt capital markets at Barclays, noted that it is “more important than ever to be level-headed, and not overreact to short-term market moves.”

After starting as a summer intern at Barclays, Meghan Graper spent more than two decades steadily rising through the ranks to become global co-head—and, at the end of 2024, sole global head—of debt capital markets. Given the DCM group’s standout results on her watch, her promotion was hardly a surprise.

Under her leadership, Barclays’ DCM business grew revenues 8% year-over-year in 2024—following a record 2023—the largest year-over-year move for Barclays since before the pandemic. Her group’s full-year 2024 revenue hit $554 million, and 2025 is on pace to exceed that mark. Through the first half of this year, revenue totaled $413 million. She has 20 direct reports, and 173 people on her team. (Graper is ranked based on the co-head role she held prior to her promotion in late 2024, as per American Banker’s methodology requiring a woman to be in her position for at least one full year.)

When Maria Hackley started recruiting talent at Georgetown University early in her career at Citigroup, impressing her managers was an accidental result. 

“Part of one’s success is the incremental things that one does outside of their day job that help senior leaders meet their goals,” Hackley explained. 

It was the early 1990s and Hackley was a coverage banker at Citi. In her free time, she flew from New York City to Washington, D.C. seeking new talent among the women, Latinos and members of the LGBTQ community at her alma mater.