While her college peers were gravitating toward internships in investment banking, Annie Cheslin found herself drawn to the buzz of the trading floor.

She landed her first job trading municipal bonds for Wells Fargo in 2012, and the buzz continues to pull her in more than a decade later.

“You walk onto a trading floor, people are engaged in conversation everywhere around you,” said Cheslin, who is now a managing director on the bank’s high-grade institutional desk. “You have to be able to be in two conversations at once and have what they call ‘bond ears’ to be able to hear what’s going on around you.”

Don’t underestimate Tracy Rudolph’s specialized skill for organizing, structuring and planning initiatives, and seeing them quietly through. Starting as Synovus Financial’s head of receivables product management in 2021, she inherited a tech project wobbling from vendor issues that her methodical approach put back on track. A subsequent initiative she oversaw proceeded with so little hubbub—virtually unheard of with major tech conversions — that the bank’s head of treasury product strategy and innovation asked if something was secretly wrong.

“No, it’s going really well,” she told Seth Marlowe, who was Rudolph’s manager at the time.

Dominique Goss may not be armed with the financial resources of Yield Giving’s MacKenzie Scott, but the way in which she supervises the development, allocation and impact of a $50 million annual budget in charitable giving and sponsorships is no less worthy. Under her leadership as executive director, the M&T Charitable Foundation has given more than $142 million to organizations within M&T Bank and Wilmington Trust’s footprint. An additional $11.4 million has been distributed via community sponsorship, including the 2025 forecast.

In the aftermath of a financial crisis, two things are certain: more regulation will follow, and the smartest bankers will look for cracks of light and see the potential for innovation. Amegy Bank’s Melissa Moncrief, EVP of Private Banking, acted on the latter, rethinking mortgage lending since the industry—and the customer experience—was redefined by the Dodd-Frank Act.

As banks across the country overhauled their mortgage practices under Dodd-Frank, the process became increasingly onerous for borrowers, especially high-net-worth clients with complex financial situations.

Anne-Victoire Auriault recognized a shift occurring in the global ETF market some 18 months ago and decided Goldman Sachs’ offerings needed to change with the times as well.

Institutional investors have increasingly sought more complex products, from actively managed ETFs and buffer strategies to thematic funds tied to artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and income generation. These products require more sophisticated trading infrastructure, particularly as firms like Goldman compete in a crowded field against the likes of Blackrock, State Street, and J.P. Morgan.

When Amy Harris learned in 2014 that UMB was hiring an in-house litigator, she leapt at the chance to work at the bank.

An associate at a law firm in Kansas City, Missouri, Harris enjoyed the courtroom. But she wanted a change from law-firm life. Plus, she added, “Those in-house litigation positions are kind of few and far between.”

She continued to bring cases to court after joining UMB, but the bank’s general counsel asked her to take on special projects alongside her litigation work. It culminated in a request to oversee how the bank’s legal team could incorporate new technologies.

Carmen Chan’s office is at the north end of Times Square, where Barclay’s U.S. Corporate and Investment Bank is headquartered, but her view is strictly global. As managing director of internet investment banking, her portfolio of both targets and clients may be filled with U.S.-based tech players, but Chan knows that each of them plays in a world without boundaries or borders.

According to Barclay’s Kristin Roth DeClark, global head of tech investment banking, the technology IPO market is in for a stellar year, with more than $50 billion worth of deals predicted in the coming 12 months, as part of the expected $3.1 trillion in global IPO and M&A activity. In such an environment, Chan’s worldly view will be a critical tool for success.

Hanen Alkhafaji, a senior software engineering manager at PNC Bank, supervises a cross-functional team of developers.

Her work at the $554 billion asset bank’s Dayton, Ohio offices was recently punctuated by a major internal restructuring of the advisor portal team. She guided them through the transition with confidence and reassurance, according to her superiors, and kept the team on track with its current projects.

As a first generation college student, Janel Taylor had no idea what she wanted to do when she graduated. But a human resources internship at Southern Company, an energy company, gave her a new direction. 

“I fell in love with every step of an employee’s life cycle at an organization,” Taylor said. “From talking to them about the opportunity and recruiting them and selling them on the position, the team, the organization, to the excitement of them accepting that job, into when there are performance challenges that we need to help support them through, or development experiences that we need to create for them so that they can develop their skills and grow.”

When you first meet Stephanie Cherrin, one of the immediate things that strikes you is her clarity of thinking—on what she does, why she does it and, even more, how she looks at the early-stage companies in which she might invest and their potential impact on the market.

The 38-year-old partner in J.P. Morgan Technology Ventures, the bank’s under-the-radar technology investment arm, is charged with identifying and making investments in fintech and cybersecurity companies. Cherrin’s demeanor—direct, candid and intentionally thoughtful about the process of investing—stands in sharp contrast to the bank’s desire to remain rather opaque about how much it invests annually in startups, the number of deals it did in 2024, or the types of investments its tech venture team is considering this year. When asked, she declined to answer questions on all of this, citing company policy.