The biggest initial public offering of 2023 — chipmaker ARM’s September debut on Nasdaq, which valued the U.K.-based company at $54.5 billion — marked a memorable day for investment banker Jessica Payne, who advised ARM on the deal. 

“Going down to the stock exchange, watching it happen live, going out into Times Square and taking all the photos, all the hype around it,” she recalled. “It was a really great day.” 

The Flint, Michigan, native was recruited out of Michigan State University to work at what was then GMAC, an arm of General Motors. The entry-level job in planning and analysis looked interesting for a finance major, especially in 2008, when the global financial crisis was taking hold. “It was an interesting time to be entering the workforce,” she recalled of her time in the Detroit office.

The following year, as the bank was rebranding to Ally, Niemczyk moved to the bank’s office in Charlotte, North Carolina, a place where she didn’t know anyone. “I view that time in my career as an excellent foundation that has served me really well over the years in terms of learning the basics, building blocks and fundamentals and economics of a consumer business and what the value drivers are,” she said.

In 2007, Majdouline Melhaoui was finishing a master’s degree in finance in France when the subprime mortgage crisis hit. “It was getting a lot of attention, especially in response to its impact on the economy, so I was really interested to understand more about the interconnectivity, between banks and the financial market and the economy in general,” she said.

Melhaoui was required to take a 12-month internship in order to finish her master’s and ended up interning in the liquidity department at a French bank. She fell in love with liquidity, and when she graduated, she went to work for BNP Paribas as a liquidity analyst.

Jo Jagadish’s experience running a microbusiness where she created custom invitations for weddings, bar mitzvahs and birthdays has fed into her dual role as head of U.S. digital banking and corporate products and services at TD Bank, a subsidiary of Toronto-based TD Bank Group.

“You are the CEO, the chief marketing officer, the chief technology officer and the chief financial officer,” said Jagadish. “You’re focused on growing your business but the tools you needed to run it were not that easy to find.”

Natalie Flanders started her banking career at First Horizon as an intern. During her senior year in college, she took classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to be able to work full days on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. “I started my time here in 2009, which was a pretty terrible time to get started in banking. But it weirdly turned out to be a blessing in disguise because I learned so much by starting in the middle of a financial crisis,” she said.

Layna Dupuis started in banking as a high schooler. “I was an incoming junior,” Dupuis said. “I wanted to work. I needed to work. I come from a hardworking family. As soon as we can work, we work,” she said.

Fortunately for Dupuis, who had been passed over by two other prospective employers, her mother had a friend at the community bank in nearby Idabel, Oklahoma, who agreed to hire her. It didn’t take long for the 16-year-old to realize she had a talent for what she termed “the service side” of banking.

Fixed income is at the center of the economy, and Amanda Deckelman sees her job as crucial to the market’s functioning. 

“How the government funds itself through the Treasury market is critical to how people live,” she said. It’s one part of how central Wall Street is to the American economy: “People’s retirement savings, pensions — it’s at the heart of where everyone’s savings and wealth originates.”

Denise Davis describes herself as “a numbers nerd,” who fell in love with banking after an internship at PNC Bank while attending the University of Pittsburgh. 

After a dozen years with the bank, Davis is now a managing director and senior relationship manager within PNC Bank’s energy group, which ranks among the top revenue-generating businesses for the bank with more than $3 billion of deployed capital and a portfolio of dozens of clients. 

Megan Comfort got into banking on the advice of her mother. Comfort’s mother, an immigrant from the Philippines, worked as a bank teller for most of Comfort’s childhood, and urged her daughter to go into banking because of the benefits and the opportunity to try different roles.

Immediately after high school, Comfort began working as a teller at Nevada State Bank, a subsidiary of Zions Bancorp. Three years later, she joined the small-business banking team at the bank. “That’s when I fell in love with banking. I loved helping small-business owners,” she said. 

Jillian Chuck has learned about providing a high-touch customer experience through an unusual avenue — by working in her parents’ Jamaican restaurant. 

Food is what initially brought her parents together. Chuck’s father immigrated to the U.S. to attend school and met her mother, who was working in his uncle’s bakery.