Tammy LoCascio is Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for First Horizon Corporation. LoCascio is responsible for technology, operations, data and business transformation functions as well as many of the company’s counter-cyclical and national businesses (FHN Financial, Mortgage Warehouse Lending, Correspondent Banking, Franchise Finance and Mortgage).

Prior to this role, LoCascio served as the Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer since the merger with IBERIABANK. From 2013-2020, she also served as Executive Vice President and Director of Retail Banking and then consumer banking, responsible for the strategic direction and support of retail banking, private client, wealth management, small business, mortgage and consumer loan delivery and the contact centers. LoCascio has also previously held senior leadership roles at Regions and National City Bank.

LoCascio has received noteworthy accolades such as the Woman of Impact by the Memphis American Heart Association, as well as the American Banker Most Powerful Women in Banking Teams award in 2022 and 2024 and Most Powerful Women in Banking Individual award in 2024. She was celebrated as a Super Woman in Business in 2018 by the Memphis Business Journal.

LoCascio is active throughout Memphis and the West Tennessee community. She currently serves on the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce as an executive committee member and Chairman’s Circle participant. She is also on the executive committees of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Memphis, Memphis Riverparks Partnership and the Mid-South Minority Business Continuum. LoCascio also joined the board of directors of Jack Henry & Associates in 2024. 

LoCascio holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration-Marketing from the University of Florida.

As a technology consultant at Accenture early in her career, Jennifer Barker learned to assess her corporate clients’ wide-ranging needs and concluded that technology can resolve most, if not all, business problems. As the global head of treasury services and depositary receipts at BNY since May 2022, she continues to apply that experience, delving into clients’ treasury-related needs and providing them with the latest tech solutions.

The bank’s Digital Employee artificial intelligence agent, for example, is one of 10 AI solutions already in production. It autonomously corrects failed payments and performs other business tasks, interacts with internal systems, and communicates with employees through tools including Outlook and TEAMS. BNY estimates that another AI-enabled solution for check-processing has reduced manual efforts by an estimated 75%, while its Wire Investigation agent summarizes complex transactions and case histories to determine the best resolution actions.

Teresa Heitsenrether is the Chief Data & Analytics Officer and a member of JPMorganChase’s Operating Committee. Leading the Data & Analytics organization, she is responsible for setting data and analytics strategy and governance standards, as well as driving firmwide adoption of artificial intelligence to develop new products, enhance productivity, and improve risk management.

Heitsenrether has spent her entire career with JPMorganChase. From 2015 to 2023, she was Global Head of Securities Services, overseeing a business responsible for safekeeping, accounting, administration, and data solutions for institutional investment managers. Under her leadership, the business achieved remarkable growth, increasing revenue by over 22% and assets under custody by nearly $9 trillion. It also launched Fusion, a scalable data platform for institutional investors.

Prior to that, Heitsenrether held various leadership roles within JPMorganChase, including Global Head of Prime Brokerage, where she spearheaded international expansion and growth. She has been recognized as one of American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Finance and named to Barron’s list of the 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance.

Heitsenrether holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Fordham University and a Master of Business Administration from New York University. She serves on the Advisory Board of Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business and is actively involved in JPMorganChase’s Women on the Move initiative and the NextGen Business Resource Group.

One of the biggest challenges Jennifer Smith has faced this year at Zions has been the Salt Lake City-based bank’s decision to require most employees to return to the office five days a week.  

“This directive reflected in a headline can sound so simple, yet there are often immediate favorable and unfavorable reactions,” Smith said.  

Particularly as it relates to IT employees, regional banks have hired people from all over the country to source the best talent, she said. “There are cases where we cannot find some talent locally in our markets,” she explained.

Deborah Guild, the head of enterprise technology and security at PNC, has served in a number of tech leadership roles at the bank over the last 12 years. This year, however, her challenges look a little different, given  the acceleration of AI, global cybersecurity threats, and an alarming increase in consumer fraud perpetrated by bad actors. 

Additionally, deepfake technology and sophisticated cyberattacks have made traditional identity verification more challenging than ever.

For Tracy Kerrins, the convergence of two enormous responsibilities at Wells Fargo is not a balancing act. It’s a single mission.

As Wells Fargo’s chief information officer for consumer technology and head of generative AI, Kerrins manages a $4 billion budget and a global team of roughly 7,000 employees. Her mandate is to modernize the bank’s core consumer platforms while embedding AI capabilities across the enterprise for 215,000 employees and nearly 70 million customers. 

“I don’t separate the roles,” Kerrins said. “Everything I do with generative AI informs what I do with consumer technology, and vice versa. It’s all about finding better, faster, and more innovative ways to serve our employees and customers.”

Lori Beer’s team recently wrote an open letter to third-party suppliers, asking them to step up their efforts on security and compliance. The letter mentioned concentration risk, a growing concern to bank regulators as banks gravitate toward the cloud-based services of tech behemoths like Google, Microsoft and Amazon. 

One antidote to concentration risk that her bank, JPMorganChase, has embraced is working with smaller vendors.

“Engaging with smaller providers is definitely important,” said Beer, who is global chief information officer at the $4 trillion-assets bank, the country’s largest. “We actually have a team dedicated to helping us ensure that we are engaging with emerging tech companies in addition to the big hyperscalers.”

As the head of consumer banking at Birmingham, Alabama-based Regions Financial, Kate Danella directs the bank’s largest business. Last year, the consumer unit produced $3.9 billion of revenue, or 53% of the company’s total. Its $1.2 billion of pretax income was 45% of the bank-wide amount.

But when Danella was asked about her biggest accomplishment in 2024, she didn’t point to any financial metrics. “Customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction,” she wrote in an email.

In the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s 2025 finance and insurance study, which was begun last year, Regions finished as the No. 1 traditional bank in customer satisfaction, Danella noted.

As the top lawyer at JPMorganChase, Stacey Friedman thinks “it’s a super interesting time to think deeply” about the rule of law in the United States. 

Friedman, the executive vice president and general counsel of the nation’s largest bank, navigates a legal and regulatory landscape on a global scale. She leads a group of more than 2,000 lawyers in multiple jurisdictions around the globe. What may be a headwind in one country could be a tailwind in another, she says.

“The front windshield is really quite big and I can watch and participate and learn,” Friedman said.  “At the end of the day, I’m super hopeful for America, for humanity, for the institution, and for the rule of law.”

The incoming questions from Wendy Stewart’s middle-market corporate banking clients this spring was universally similar. Across industrial, marketplace and geographical settings, companies were asking about strategies surrounding trade, tariffs, inflation, interest rates and even immigration, in the wake of recessionary worries ramping up across both Wall Street and Main Street.  

“I’m hearing a lot of things that start with a ‘t’ or an ‘i’,” said Stewart, the Atlanta-based president of Bank of America’s Global Commercial Banking unit. “We started off the year expecting to go in one direction, and it clearly went in a very different direction.”

But under Stewart’s direction, the bank’s commercial banking services continued to attract and maintain American businesses’ confidence, gaining 8% year-over-year growth in middle-market loans and a 15% gain in deposits to over $600 billion. This follows similarly strong results in 2024 that saw 4% annual growth in loans and 6% t in deposits, from companies in 115 U.S. and Canadian cities (plus another 15 international markets) with between $50 million and $2 billion in yearly revenues.