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The financial services industry is experiencing unprecedented market and technological change, increasingly being transformed—and challenged by—artificial intelligence, blockchain, digital assets and the growing use cases for their implementation.
While digital banking, mobile wallets and instant payments continue to make transactions faster, more convenient and more accessible for customers, the rise of on-chain finance, digital assets and stablecoin payments represents the traditional financial industry’s greatest new frontier, with companies moving quickly to develop their digital-asset strategies and position themselves for the future. Taken together, the effects of the digital economy—notably, the ability to reduce costs, maximize speed and open up services to new customers—is propelling a greater democratization of financial services.
The 25 leaders ranked as The Most Powerful Women in Finance are at the forefront of this technological transformation, adapting to change, driving results and exploring new opportunities that sit at the intersection of business and innovation.
In the top spot for the third consecutive year is JPMorganChase’s Mary Callahan Erdoes, CEO, asset and wealth management, who is spearheading an industry-leading initiative to make AI central to how her 30,000 team members work. Yie-Hsin Hung, president and CEO, State Street Investment Management (#2) is expanding the company’s presence in private markets and exchange-traded fund (ETF) servicing. Abigail Johnson, chair and CEO of Fidelity Investments (#3)—one of the first financial executives to recognize the coming power of digital assets, and the first traditional firm to launch an institutional digital-asset custody and trading platform, Fidelity Digital Assets, in October 2018—was pushing the bounds of innovation again when Fidelity became one of the first firms to launch a spot Bitcoin ETF in January 2024. Edward Jones Managing Partner Penny Pennington (#4) started a venture-investing arm to leverage more innovative technologies, and Thasunda Brown Duckett, president and CEO of TIAA (#5) launched a proprietary generative AI platform last year.
Collectively, these leaders are redefining how the industry serves its customers, devising business strategies that will unlock new markets, making more aggressive investments in emerging technologies to generate more revenue while reducing costs, and give their customers and employees better, faster and cheaper digital products and platforms that meet their changing needs.