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.

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.

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.