In her eight-year tenure as Nasdaq CEO, Adena Friedman has led a massive transformation of the iconic stock exchange into a global financial services technology powerhouse. Nasdaq has diversified beyond its core listings and index business into a business partner for banking and capital markets, expanding its reach into treasury, risk and compliance management and regulatory reporting. 

Anchored by a $10.5 billion acquisition of software giant Adenza in 2023, Nasdaq under Friedman’s leadership has most recently built a suite of compliance and anti-financial crime services used by most globally systemic institutions through AI-driven models for areas such as AML due diligence or sanctions assessments.

Jenny Johnson believes Franklin Templeton has unlocked the key to bringing investments in private markets to more clients, a trend that is likely to accelerate under Trump administration policies designed to broaden access to private equity, real estate and other less liquid investment options. The key is something the firm has been doing for three decades—educating financial advisers.

Advisers want to give their clients more options, said Johnson, president and CEO of Franklin Templeton, which manages about $1.6 trillion in assets. “There’s a real recognition that it’s kind of un-American if we don’t all have fair access to the same kinds of investments.” 

But it is not enough to pick a good product, she said. “If the firm behind that product hasn’t surrounded it with really robust education, it’s too hard for the advisers to understand.”

When TIAA launched an IRA product broadening access to its proprietary annuity products on March 10, the stock market recorded one of its most volatile days in years. Investors were fretting over the impact of tariffs and the possibility of a recession.

The day’s roller coaster ride reinforced what TIAA president and CEO Thasunda Brown Duckett already believed about the value of lifetime income annuities.

“Guaranteed income isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity,” Duckett said, arguing that people want security they can count on regardless of market swings. “That’s why we’re committed to expanding access to guaranteed lifetime income solutions, in both the institutional and retail markets.”

Abigail Johnson, known to all as Abby, runs her family’s old-school asset management firm with a focus on alternative investments that couldn’t even be traded on an exchange a year ago. 

Fidelity Digital Assets, which provides custodial and trading services for the crypto holdings of institutional and high-net worth clients, operates as an independent subsidiary and has become a core contributor to the $6.4 trillion-asset company, which grew to $32.7 billion in 2024 revenues. (The company has about $16.4 trillion under administration.)

Mary Callahan Erdoes arrives for a meeting seven minutes late, apologizing profusely. The CEO of JPMorganChase’s mammoth asset and wealth management (AWM) business moved into the company’s gleaming new headquarters at 270 Park Avenue a day earlier and underestimated the return time to her office after escorting a client to the entrance. “This building is the craziest thing that’s happened to New York City in a long time,” she said.

If you really want to see something crazy, look at the high-energy Erdoes’ workload—and her results. Over the past year she’s shepherded the bank’s high-net-worth clients through a volatile spring, flown around the world to meet with heads of state and billionaires, spoken at big forums, including the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and even helped fetch a record price for a venerable sports franchise. She also played a high-profile role as the most senior member of Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon’s operating committee.

With digital commerce growing rapidly, it’s important to pick up the pace of development, Bridgit Chayt says.

“Last year has shown a lot of progress in the way we work,” said Chayt, executive vice president and head of commercial payments and treasury management. “We have been able to onboard at the ‘speed of fintech’ rather than the ‘speed of banking,’ which is gratifying.” 

Chayt was pivotal to Fifth Third’s acquisition of Rize Money in late 2023 and the subsequent launch of Newline, the bank’s embedded payments business. Embedded payments refers to payment products that are integrated into software or a platform. Consumers or businesses use embedded payments to complete a transaction without leaving an app or website. Embedded payments are often grouped with embedded finance, which refers to the delivery of banking services via relationships with third parties, another strategy that is a big part of Fifth Third’s business.

Hope Dmuchowski is senior executive vice president and chief financial officer for First Horizon Corporation. She has responsibility for accounting, treasury, financial planning & analysis, line of business finance, banking data analytics, loan and deposit pricing, corporate development, and investor relations. In addition to her financial management responsibilities, she also has responsibility for corporate properties, sourcing, and procurement.

Dmuchowski has over 25 years of experience in banking and brings a wealth of finance, accounting and merger expertise having served in several key roles running integrated business and economic models, budgeting, forecasting, financial analysis, regulatory reporting, and operations. Prior to joining First Horizon in 2021, Dmuchowski worked at Truist and the predecessor bank BB&T in numerous roles, including head of financial planning and analysis and management reporting, chief financial officer of corporate banking, commercial banking and corporate groups, chief financial officer group director as well as chief financial and operating officer of enterprise operations services. Dmuchowski began her banking career in the Leadership Development program for the sales and trading division of Deutsche Bank.

Dmuchowski has a passion for serving her community and is an avid volunteer in every city where she has lived. She currently serves on the non-profit boards for the National Salvation Army, where she is currently the treasurer, 4Word and the Baptist Hospital Foundation. She also serves on St. George’s Independent School board of directors.

Dmuchowski holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and a Master of Science degree in Business Management both from Saint Elizabeth University, as well as a Women in Leadership certification from Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business.

Jill Castilla knows what success looks like.

Castilla took the helm as CEO of Edmond, Oklahoma-based Citizens Bank of Edmond in 2009, when the bank was reeling from the still-unfolding global financial crisis. In the intervening years, Castilla has not only turned the bank back from the brink of failure, but also expanded its size and profile into a stable and successful bank with more than $416 million of assets.

But success can be defined in a number of different ways, Castilla said, and many of the ways that bankers traditionally measure success may not capture some of the initiatives that make a difference for customers. As a privately-owned and primarily employee-owned business, Castilla faces less pressure for quarterly earnings results than many of her publicly-traded peers, which she says helps her focus less on short-term profits and more on long-term goals, such as securing inexpensive deposits to make loans. The bank’s core deposits grew 35% between November 2023 and May of this year.

Last year, Jodi Richard’s job was particularly fraught amid a landscape of market volatility, cybersecurity concerns, the growing impact of artificial intelligence and the ever increasing speed of payments.

As the vice chair and chief risk officer for the $678 billion-asset U.S. Bank, Richard drives every decision related to risk and controls, including credit risk, liquidity and interest rate risk, and fraud risk. “Successfully managing liquidity and interest rate risk has been of paramount importance as we continue to navigate economic uncertainty and market volatility,” Richard told American Banker.

In 2020, less than one year into becoming Wells Fargo CEO, Charles Scharf tapped Ellen Patterson to lead the bank’s legal department. The job promised to be a challenge: Well Fargo faced a mountain of federal investigations plus class action lawsuits and overall concern it could not manage risk.

Four years after coming over from TD Bank, Patterson said, “I feel really good about the progress we’ve made putting a number of historical matters behind us.”