Laurie Stewart, who has led Sound Community Bank for more than 30 years, said her guiding principle as CEO is “community is our middle name.”

Her employees are a large part of Stewart’s community, and she measures her success by keeping layoffs and turnover as low as possible despite economic pressures.

“I think 2024 was a year of really needing to manage through challenging economic times, but still be honest to your culture and your commitment to your stakeholders, including the communities that we serve,” she said.

Christina Mohr is confident that her team can excel at a restructured Citigroup.

“What they’re calling simplification at Citi is really about putting clients at the center of what we do,” said Mohr, the New York company’s vice chair of M&A and investment banking. In other words, Citi is focused on what has always guided her career: “To serve clients intensively.”

As the president and CEO of Hanmi Financial Corp. in Los Angeles, California, Bonnie Lee is one of just eleven female CEOs of publicly traded financial institutions. 

Since becoming CEO in 2019, she has grown Hanmi’s total assets from $5.5 billion to $7.6 billion, an increase of 36%. She did this, she said, by strengthening the bank’s balance sheet; diversifying its loan portfolio, which was concentrated in commercial real estate when she took the helm; expanding its products and services; and closing some branches and opening others, especially as the bank expanded into Texas, Illinois, and the eastern U.S. 

Debbra Schoneman believes in the power of the “learning zone” — the space just beyond an individual’s comfort zone where growth and resilience are forged. 

It’s a mindset she adopted later in her career and serves her well in running Piper Sandler as president over the past seven years, especially during a year when market conditions have demanded both adaptability and discipline.

“If we fail to regularly challenge ourselves, our comfort zone will continue to contract,” she said. 

Cassandra McKinney has proclaimed one of her tenets for career success on her license plate for more than 20 years: WRK2PLY.

“Work hard; play hard,” said McKinney, who leads personal and small business banking for Dallas-based Comerica Bank. “I do believe in living by that because I give my all at work. But when it’s time to rest, to re-energize, to spend time with family, to invest in myself and my development, I work just as hard at that as well,” she said.

For Lori Heinel, helping women in the workplace requires more than just chatting over lunch. 

“If you’re going to mentor women, you have to be willing to stand up for them, advocate for them and not let the narrative around their behaviors override their capabilities and their expertise,” she said.

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.)

“I was raised in a family where you needed to earn what you had,” said Pourchet, head of corporate and institutional banking, Latin America, at BNP Paribas, where she leads 980 employees and helps manage nearly $2.6 trillion of client assets. “You need to persevere and you need to be very thankful.”

Pourchet later emigrated to New York, with a husband and three children in tow, to become head of commodity structured debt in Latin America at BNP Paribas.

Melissa Stevens is moving colleagues and customers to digital banking, but she is also growing Fifth Third Bank in a more traditional way: Increasing the number of physical branches.

Stevens’ expansive role at the Cincinnati-based lender includes head of enterprise workplace services, which puts her in charge of Fifth Third’s properties. Between 2019 and 2023, Fifth Third opened 107 new branches in the Southeastern states of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee, according to the bank.