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.

As chief information officer at KeyBank, Amy Brady has guided the bank to high talent retention rates within the company’s technology, operations and services (KTOS) organization. In a highly competitive market for technical talent, this stability is a significant strategic advantage.

The division, which includes 4,524 employees, had a voluntary annualized attrition rate of 6.8% in 2024. Technology employees had attrition as low as 3.78%. These figures, which are below industry averages according to the bank, reflect a culture that minimizes disruption, preserves institutional knowledge and reduces the high costs associated with recruitment.

This success in workforce stability is a direct reflection of Brady’s focus on employee engagement and professional growth. She advocates for empowering her employees to be the “CEOs of their careers,” a philosophy supported by internal development programs that she said goes beyond typical training, fostering critical skills like adaptability, digital fluency and complex decision-making.

“Chief experience officer” is the kind of job title that seems open to interpretation.

Beth Johnson took on the role of vice chair and chief experience officer at Citizens three years ago. For her, the job title means that she’s responsible for building the Providence, Rhode Island, bank’s capabilities so it can deliver excellent customer experiences in a rapidly changing banking environment. That includes digital design, data and analytics, marketing and communications and enterprise payments strategy and infrastructure.

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.”

BMO’s Erminia “Ernie” Johannson said leadership requires courage, perseverance and resilience.

She led the successful integration of one of the largest U.S. banking acquisitions last year with the acquisition of Bank of the West. The deal catapulted the $1.3 trillion-asset BMO into the ranks of the top 10 banks in the U.S. by assets.

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.