Public sector banking doesn’t have a line on Citi’s income statement. But Monaco’s global influence is threaded throughout the bank’s work with government finance ministries, central banks and other sovereign entities.

As a kid growing up in the ‘70s, Julie Monaco never imagined being a banker. A regular at model UN competitions, she pictured a career with the State Department or maybe the United Nations. Fortunately for Citigroup, Monaco discovered banking. Following a path shaped by friends, mentors and bosses—and at least one fortuitous encounter—she landed in a position tailor-made for her skills and passions.

Jennifer Taylor’s workday spans continents, often beginning in, say, Australia and ending somewhere in Latin America. It’s a rhythm that perfectly captures the global scope of her role as Citi’s chief compliance officer for banking and international. 

With oversight and responsibilities across 160 markets and a physical presence in over 90 countries, Taylor’s work puts her at the forefront of international risk management during one of the most transformative periods in financial services. 

“I genuinely, really enjoy the challenge of our global footprint,” she said. “I find that fascinating.”

When Jennifer Doyle landed a temp job on the First Union trading floor in Charlotte, North Carolina, after graduating from college, she felt like she’d won the lottery.

At the time Doyle didn’t know much about Wall Street or investment banking, or sales and trading. But as a former college tennis player, she relished the fast pace and competitive nature of the work.

“It was truly right place, right time,” she said.

Doyle parlayed her temp job into a 25-year career starting at First Union, its successor Wachovia and then Wachovia’s acquirer, Wells Fargo. For the last three years, Doyle has been co-head of the structured products group at the San Francisco-based bank, a role that continues to engage her competitive spirit.

Sports analogies are rife when talking about business, but when Jill Gateman describes the middle market as a team of quarterbacks, you listen. That’s because Gateman has spent the better part of the last two decades shaping the middle market offering of industry leaders such as PNC. While she takes on a broader remit in her new role as co-head of U.S. commercial banking, her experiences working with the middle market still drives her thinking.

“If you’re familiar with middle market, I look at them as almost like the quarterback. They bring the whole bank to all of our clients and prospects,” Gateman observed. Her new role has given her a different perspective on how it fits into the larger commercial bank offering. 

That role focuses on TD’s national corporate and specialty businesses, including middle market, sponsor-backed and fund finance, institutional commercial real estate, asset-based lending, franchise finance, healthcare, municipal, non-profit and higher education. (Until September 2024, Gateman was head of corporate banking and specialized finance, the role on which her 2025 ranking is based, as per American Banker‘s methodology requiring a full year of performance.)

In college, Christiana Riley was a French and Italian major who loved all things international.

So when an opportunity arose after graduation to work for a New York City-based company with multinational clients, she took it. It didn’t matter that the job was an analyst role at the boutique investment bank Greenhill or that her background was in Romance languages.

“I’m the accidental banker,” Riley told American Banker. “But my real passion and the reason I was driven toward banking … was because of the truly global nature of this industry.”

In an era where Wall Street is being reshaped by technology and regulation, Ericka Leslie, COO of Goldman Sachs’ global banking and markets (GBM) division, has made a career out of mastering fast-paced change.

Her mandate spans the firm’s entire investment banking and trading apparatus, including FICC, equities and the capital solutions group. And it’s been a busy and profitable few years. GBM accounted for $34.94 billion in net revenues in 2024 – 16% higher than 2023, Goldman said.

Early this year, UMB Financial Corporation closed on its $2 billion acquisition of Heartland Financial, the largest such deal in its 111-year-old history. The acquisition boosted Kansas City, Missouri-based UMB’s assets by over 30%, to approximately $68 billion, and grew its presence from eight to 13 states. 

Uma Wilson’s role in managing product development, technology and operations at UMB Bank means she and her team have been in an “extremely heavy lifting” mode throughout the acquisition process, Wilson said.     

“The initial review of all the different systems and different products and offerings from Heartland Financial Institution came out of my team,” she explained.

A self-confessed “unexpected banker”, she spent the first two decades of her career in courtrooms and conference rooms, practicing law for both the public defender’s office and the Chicago Board of Education. But in 2009, in the middle of the Great Recession, Skalicky felt the pull back to the family business. Founded by Skalicky’s father in 1963 – the same year she was born – she had agreed to help the bank with the rescue mission.

At the time, Stearns was one of a handful of banks tapped by the FDIC to assume ownership of failing banks. Through this process she came to see the local bank as the hub of a town. 

“Sometimes you have to get out of your own community to see how banking can be empowering,” Skalicky said.

When then-Michigan-based Comerica acquired a community bank in Texas in 1988, Melinda Chausse was asked to develop training and recruitment programs in Dallas.

Chausse was halfway through Comerica’s two-year training program for commercial bankers, but she took the assignment anyway.

She did not intend to stay more than a couple of years. “But I got here and very quickly loved the entrepreneurial spirit of being on the ground floor of a bank that was going to be built from that original acquisition.”

In her 27 years at FNBO, Mihaela Kobjerowski has worked her way up the ranks in roles with progressively more responsibility. In 1998, she began her FNBO career as a credit risk analyst in credit card portfolio management. She quickly ascended to a role leading credit card portfolio management, and subsequently was tapped to create a decision science initiative tasked with developing customized risk and marketing analytics.

In her current job as executive vice president and chief credit officer, which she’s held since November 2023, Kobjerowski manages credit risk for the bank’s $23 billion loan portfolio, comprising $12.5 billion in consumer loans and $10.5 billion in commercial loans. The loan portfolio includes consumer credit cards, large-scale financing of apartment buildings, and agricultural loans.