Lara Abrash leads the board of directors of Deloitte US, the nation's largest professional services organization, governing a firm of more than 180,000 professionals and over $30 billion in annual revenue. Elected to the role in 2023, she has helped guide Deloitte through rapid advances in AI, emerging technologies and workplace transformation. Previously, Abrash led Deloitte's U.S. Audit & Assurance business and earlier served as the firm's National Managing Partner for Audit Innovation. She also chairs the Deloitte Foundation.

62 | President & CEO, BECU

Financial services veteran Beverly Anderson became the head of BECU in 2022, a credit union whose nearly $30 billion in assets and 1.4 million members make it one of the top five credit unions in the country. Before joining BECU, Anderson led Equifax’s global consumer solutions division and also held leadership roles at Wells Fargo and American Express. Anderson has said learning about the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—which separated consumer banking from investment banking—in college sparked her interest in banking. She also serves on several boards, including for Expedia and Harvard Business School African-American Alumni Association.

65 | Principal Investment Officer & Portfolio Manager, Capital Group

Hilda Applbaum is the principal investment officer of Capital Group's $145 billion American Funds Income Fund of America, one of the top-performing funds in its category. Over 15 years, the fund has returned an average 8.6% annually and beat 98% of peers, per Morningstar, including a benchmark-beating 17.8% return at net asset value (NAV) in 2025. With four decades of investment experience, one of her strategies is to buy dividend-paying shares of challenged companies and wait—sometimes for years—for the recovery. The daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, Applbaum credits early lessons in saving and resilience for her long-horizon approach.

60 | CEO, State Employees’ Credit Union (SECU)

Over the past four decades, Leigh Brady has risen from an entry-level accountant to the first woman to lead North Carolina's State Employees' Credit Union. Today, she oversees the nation's second-largest credit union, which serves 3 million members across North Carolina and manages approximately $60 billion in assets. Brady became CEO in 2023 after serving as the organization's chief operating officer and previously as chief human resources and communications officer.

62 | Founder & CEO, Martlet Asset Management

Jane Buchan has built two successful firms in the alternative investment and hedge fund space. In 2000, she founded the Pacific Alternative Asset Management Company (PAAMCO), which grew into PAAMCO Prisma, a firm managing $32 billion in assets. In 2018, PAAMCO spun out its alternative beta strategy as Martlet Asset Management, a private hedge fund that Buchan leads as CEO and co-CIO. In 2025, Buchan also became the chair of the Standards Board for Alternative Investments, an alliance of 150 alternative asset managers and 100-plus institutional investors.

52 | Founder & CEO, Piermont Bank

Wendy Cai-Lee was 45 when she founded Piermont Bank in 2019, becoming the first Asian American woman to launch a U.S. commercial bank. She built Piermont to serve entrepreneurs, fast-growing businesses and fintech apps, including workplace-finance platform Wagestream. Now 52, Cai-Lee leads a bank with $500 million in assets. Before starting Piermont, she spent nearly three decades in financial services, with roles at JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Deloitte and East West Bank.

58 | Global Head of Endowment & Foundation Practice, Cambridge Associates

An investor at the $616 billion (assets under management and advisement) Cambridge Associates for the last 25 years, Margaret Chen oversees the firm’s work with foundations and nonprofits seeking to grow their endowments. She previously led the business’s outsourced CIO portfolios division. Outside of her investment work, Chen is the chair of the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras and chair of the Advisory Council for the Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University.

61 | President & CEO, Lincoln Financial

Long before her 2022 power move to become president and CEO of insurance giant Lincoln Financial, Ellen Cooper wanted to become a Broadway star. It was through a mentor at Temple University that she transitioned from a dance major to a business focus, and soon she joined the likes of Tillinghast, EY and, eventually, Goldman Sachs. Since joining Lincoln in 2012, Cooper has spent more than 14 years in leadership positions, and has led the company to serve more 17 million customers and manage more than $32 billion in account balances.

51 | President & CEO, Friendship Bridge

As president and CEO of Friendship Bridge, Tracie Cordeiro leads a nonprofit that provides microfinance, education and preventive health services to women in rural Guatemala through its Microcredit Plus model. Serving women exclusively, the organization pairs average loans of about $320 with training and support while maintaining a loan repayment rate of nearly 98%, helping families build long-term financial resilience. A certified public accountant who previously held leadership roles at KPMG, Honeywell and Opera Australia, Cordeiro is expanding access to economic opportunity for women in underserved communities.

Denise Dresser joined OpenAI as chief revenue officer in December and oversees revenue strategy for ChatGPT’s fast-growing parent company. Today, OpenAI generates $2 billion in revenue each month, 40% of which comes from enterprise customers, outpacing industry stalwarts like Meta and Alphabet. Prior to joining OpenAI, Dresser spent 14 years at Salesforce, most recently as CEO of Slack, which Salesforce acquired in 2021. Earlier in her career, Dresser was a consultant with accounting firm Arthur Andersen.

56 | General Partner & Investor, Yes VC

Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake now sits on the other side of the entrepreneurial equation with Yes VC, the seed-stage venture firm she started in 2018 to invest in category-defining startups at the forefront of social and technological change. Her portfolio companies include Superhuman, Boom Supersonic, Lovevery, Gameto and more. The name of her firm stems from a quote she gave in an interview years ago: “When the world says No No No No No, and you hear a Yes, go towards that Yes as hard as you can.”

52 | President & CEO, FIS

Stephanie Ferris worked her way across multiple roles in the C-suite before becoming CEO of fintech giant FIS in 2022. In 2025, she orchestrated a sweeping portfolio reshaping, selling FIS' remaining stake in Worldpay while acquiring Global Payments' Issuer Solutions business in a pair of linked transactions. The Jacksonville-based company also generated more than $10 billion in 2025 revenue. “If you know strategically what you’re doing is the right thing—no matter what’s going to happen in the market—you move forward,” Ferris told Forbes in an interview last year.

56 | CEO & Chief Investment Officer, Soros Fund Management

Dawn Fitzpatrick traded races for Wall Street after running track at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. She went on to oversee more than $500 billion in client assets as head of investments for UBS Asset Management before joining billionaire George Soros' $28 billion hedge fund in 2017. Today, she serves as CEO and chief investment officer while also chairing the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas' Financial Sector Advisory Council. She also sits on the boards of Barclays and Under........

© Forbes