A Program Designed for Decisive Leaders

Banking is operating within a period of massive disruption. AI is shifting from a support function to a decisioning layer, real-time payments are resetting the definition of liquidity and speed, and tokenization is beginning to reshape how value is issued, moved, and held on balance sheets. Yet too many institutions continue to treat these forces as future-state initiatives rather than present-tense competitive realities.

This panel challenges leaders to confront a harder question: whether their operating models are structurally capable of keeping pace. As fintech platforms and Big Tech increasingly function as infrastructure layers rather than competitors, and as regulatory frameworks evolve into strategic variables, the traditional boundaries of banking advantage are eroding.

The discussion will focus on where disruption is already operational, where incumbents are most exposed, and why the greatest risk is internal execution lag—and what every leader needs to do about it.

Stacey Mullin, BlackRock’s Deputy Chief Operating Officer, has spent nearly two decades helping the firm navigate some of the most consequential shifts in modern business – from the Global Financial Crisis and Brexit to Covid and today’s rapid advances in AI. In this fireside chat, Stacey will explore how leaders can turn moments of inflection into opportunities for creativity, growth and innovation. She’ll discuss what it takes to deploy AI at scale in ways that deliver for clients and create great careers for people, while sharing lessons from her own journey growing alongside BlackRock and leading through transformation.

As banking and financial services evolve toward AI-driven operations, tokenized assets, programmable money, and digitally native financial infrastructure, women leaders must move beyond execution and develop the strategic influence needed to shape institutional direction and industry transformation.

This panel explores how emerging leaders can evolve from functional experts into enterprise strategists by building cross-functional influence, developing digital and regulatory fluency, and connecting innovation to business outcomes. Panelists will discuss the leadership skills increasingly required to lead transformation across banking, payments, fintech, capital markets, and digital assets in a rapidly changing financial landscape.

Managing a multi-generational workforce is no longer just an HR issue, it’s a commercial imperative. Yet too many leaders see age gaps as a challenge rather than a strength. To lead effectively through rapid industry shifts, executives must learn to tailor development across vastly different career stages. This session explores actionable strategies to help veterans adapt to new workflows while retaining emerging talent who demand different management styles.

When screens go dark, a cyber breach becomes a high-stakes business survival test. Navigating an incident beyond the firewall requires a tactical playbook to manage resulting operational fallout. This session focuses on handling critical communications, rapid regulatory reporting, and protecting customer trust. We will explore how to effectively partner with technical security teams and confidently make high-stakes operational decisions with incomplete information.

Innovation comes from well-executed, strategic dissent. Too many executives shy from voicing concerns because they lack frameworks to challenge assumptions without burning political capital. This roundtable focuses on the art of presenting a contrarian perspective in high-stakes environments. We will explore how to argue effectively without sacrificing professional equity or being mischaracterized, and how to deploy strategic pushback that drives better business outcomes.

Choosing the right fintech partner is only the first step—the real competitive advantage lies in execution and commercialization. Too many institutions treat fintech integration as a simple IT upgrade rather than a core growth engine. This session shifts the conversation from defensive risk management to offensive value creation. The discussion will explore how forward-thinking banks are strategically capitalizing on their fintech partnerships to unlock new revenue streams, aggressively lower customer acquisition costs, and rapidly capture market share.

For rising executives, moving into leadership roles with increasing responsibility and influence requires more than executing day-to-day duties. It demands the ability to envision and drive visible, meaningful ideas that lead to business outcomes and/or institutional change. This session outlines the strategic roadmap for turning a strategic business, market or innovation idea into a career-defining promotion. Our panel of prominent executives will deconstruct the mechanics of stress-testing an original idea, how to successfully execute it while also capturing the attention of an executive sponsor who can advocate for your ascension, and steps to leverage your success into a promotion. Our panelists will discuss:

The Genesis of an Idea: How should a rising executive evaluate an idea to ensure it aligns with core corporate KPIs (e.g., efficiency ratios, new revenue streams) rather than just being a “passion project”?

Sponsorship vs. Mentorship: How do you intentionally transition a senior leader from a passive mentor who gives advice into an active sponsor who risks political capital for your advancement?

Securing the Promotion: Once the project succeeds, how do you formally position your leadership of that initiative as the primary business case for your promotion?

As artificial intelligence reshapes how financial services operate, it is also fundamentally redefining the nature of fraud and cybersecurity risk. What was once managed as a perimeter defense or a back-office risk function has become a continuous, enterprise-wide leadership challenge—where threats evolve in real time, at machine speed, across every customer interaction and internal workflow.

This panel brings together senior banking and financial services leaders to explore how the AI era is forcing a redefinition of ownership, accountability, and decision-making in cybersecurity and fraud prevention. Synthetic identities, deepfake-enabled authorization attacks, and fully automated fraud chains are no longer theoretical risks—they are active forces reshaping trust, customer experience, and operational resilience.

The conversation will focus on what leadership looks like in this environment: how executives balance innovation with security, how accountability is structured when AI systems participate in decision-making, and how institutions can shift from reactive defense models to proactive, AI-native risk governance. At its core, this is a discussion about leadership under conditions where trust, speed, and security are now inseparable.

Drawing on lessons from leading businesses throughout her career, Lisa explores why successful leaders proactively chart their own careers, communicate their ambitions, and embrace opportunities outside their comfort zones. She will share practical approaches to understanding your value, taking calculated risks, building sponsorship networks, and positioning yourself to capitalize on unexpected opportunities, while building a career strategy that evolves with changing market opportunities. Attendees will leave with a framework for becoming the CEO of their own careers.

Over the course of a career spanning multiple global leadership positions, Lisa McGeough has learned that the most defining moments rarely come from the safest choices. In this candid keynote, she shares the pivotal decisions that shaped her path, from pursuing international opportunities and taking on challenging leadership assignments to navigating career progression while balancing competing personal and professional priorities.

Introduction: Mary Ellen Egan, Senior Director, Strategy and Content, American Banker Live Media

In today’s banking environment—defined by rapid regulatory change, AI-enabled operating models, and accelerating digital and on-chain finance—executive presence has become a performance differentiator. It is no longer about visibility, but about the ability to shape decisions, translate complexity into enterprise impact, and create confidence in high-stakes moments.

This panel explores how leaders can accelerate their influence by framing ideas in terms of financial and enterprise outcomes, communicating with precision under pressure, and controlling the narrative in critical executive and regulatory discussions. Panelists will share how they built credibility before reaching senior titles by consistently connecting execution to strategy, leading through ambiguity, and earning trust across risk, technology, and business leadership.

Gain a practical understanding of how executive presence directly drives career acceleration, decision authority, and enterprise impact—and what it takes to operate as a strategic voice in the moments that matter most in modern financial institutions.

True digital transformation can’t happen in a vacuum. Elevating customer experience through AI requires more than just launching smart applications. To improve customer experience with AI without creating new organizational silos, banks have to shift away from buying fragmented “point solutions”—like an isolated chatbot for your mobile app or a separate AI tool just for marketing emails–to building a horizontal architecture.

This session examines how to achieve a silo-free, enterprise-wide engagement model that connects the front-end customer experience directly to back-end operations.

In banking, risk is not a department—it is the baseline architecture of every transaction, product, and customer interaction. Historically, financial institutions managed risk in siloes: credit risk lived in lending, compliance lived in legal, and cyber threat vectors lived in IT. Today, those boundaries have entirely dissolved.

This session will examine the evolving nature of risk and how understanding risk management is critical for career ascension.

Banks are under pressure to modernize technology faster than customer expectations evolve. This leadership roundtable explores how senior leaders can build the infrastructure needed to support continuous innovation—from legacy modernization and cloud transformation to enterprise AI and emerging on-chain capabilities. Participants will discuss how to balance resilience with speed, align technology investments with business outcomes, and create an architecture that enables the bank to adapt, scale, and compete in a digital-first future.

The best digital products are rarely built by one business unit alone. They emerge when leaders across product, technology, operations, risk, data, compliance, and the business unite around a shared customer need or market opportunity. This roundtable explores how women leaders can build internal alliances, break down silos, secure executive sponsorship, and lead cross-functional innovation that accelerates product development, drives measurable business results, and strengthens competitive advantage.

AI is no longer just augmenting workflows—it is beginning to make decisions, take actions and coordinate work across the enterprise. As agentic AI systems evolve from copilots to operators, bank executives face a defining leadership question: Who governs decision-making when machines act autonomously?

This panel explores why AI is no longer a technology initiative, but an enterprise-wide leadership mandate requiring new approaches to accountability, risk and control. Panelists examine where AI is already shifting from recommendation to execution, which functions are closest to becoming agent-driven, what decisions leaders are willing to delegate, and why CEOs and boards—not just Chief AI Officers, CIOs and CTOs—must personally own the governance of AI at scale.

Regulation is becoming a live mechanism for defining market structure, competitive advantage and product feasibility. In the post-GENIUS Act environment and evolution of digital-asset frameworks, regulatory interpretation increasingly shapes how capital moves, how products are designed, and how financial institutions position themselves in emerging digital markets.

The panel explores how financial institutions are shifting from reactive compliance to proactive regulatory collaboration. Panelists will share insights on building constructive working relationships with regulators, navigating cross-border jurisdictional strategy, and how they are working alongside regulators to define new frameworks and policies.

Women have made meaningful gains in banking leadership, but the path to the CEO office remains remarkably narrow. Despite years of progress, just two of the top 50 U.S. banks are led by female CEOs, exposing a persistent gap between executive representation and ultimate leadership. Why does advancement stall at the final stretch? This candid discussion examines the structural barriers that continue to shape succession—from unequal access to P&L roles and executive sponsorship to enterprise visibility and outdated expectations of leadership. C-suite executives will share practical strategies for building cross-functional influence, positioning for CEO succession, and shifting from functional operator to enterprise leader in an industry where the pipeline remains fragile and the stakes have never been higher.

The panel will discuss why the focus should move beyond leadership development programs to redesigning the executive pipeline itself, including:

• Giving high-potential women earlier ownership of large P&Ls.
• Rotating future leaders through technology, digital, payments, and commercial businesses—not only corporate functions.
• Measuring the impact of sponsorship.
• Making succession planning more transparent and evidence-based.
• Ensuring women lead the bank’s most strategically important initiatives, especially those involving AI, digital and on-chain transformation, and other engines of growth and transformation.