Executive Editor, Technology
American Banker
Penny Crosman is Interim Editor-in-Chief at Digital Insurance and Executive Editor, Technology at American Banker and Arizent. Prior to taking on these roles, she was Editor in Chief of Bank Technology News and Technology Editor of American Banker. She has held senior editorial roles at Bank Systems & Technology, Wall Street & Technology, Intelligent Enterprise, Network Magazine and Imaging Magazine.
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.
Digital finance affords financial institutions and their customers an enhanced experience, the ability to interact and conduct financial transactions across channels, and the real-time delivery of hyper-personalized new products. Yet the increasingly sophisticated exploitation of security vulnerabilities and gaps to commit fraud using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is set to unleash a tidal wave of fraud. The panel discusses the urgency for banks and financial institutions to develop a multi-layered security strategy to detect and prevent the rapidly accelerating rise of GenAI-powered fraud across channels—much of it occurring through extremely capable, global criminal and nation-state-run enterprises.
Bank and financial services executives face a challenge of moving legacy systems to modern, cloud-based architectures while ensuring business continuity. The leadership issue they face: How to balance investment in innovation with cost control and return on equity pressures. The roundtable discussion will center on how leaders can foster a culture that embraces digital-first thinking across all levels.
Financial institutions that are looking to generate business outcomes with artificial intelligence (AI) must identify use cases that drive adoption by creating a strategic framework that aligns business value, data readiness and risk management. The goal is to achieve production-grade deployment that delivers a return on investment. The challenges that institutions face: data ecosystems are often fragmented and unprepared for AI scale, and risks—bias, privacy, security and regulatory compliance—can derail adoption if not addressed early. Among the points to be discussed by panelists: