Top 10: AI Leaders in Financial Services

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping financial services, from trading floors to retail banking and wealth management. 

AI Magazine’s latest Top 10 highlights the leaders driving that transformation inside the world’s most influential institutions and fintech innovators. 

From generative AI assistants for advisers to enterprise-wide risk and fraud systems, these executives are defining how intelligence is built, governed and deployed at scale. 

Together, they represent the shift from experimentation to production-grade AI that is already changing how finance operates.

10. Kristin Milchanowski

Founded: 1817

CEO: Darryl White

Service: Financial service including personal and commercial banking, investment banking and financial advisory services. 

Kristin leads BMO’s data and AI strategy, driving digital transformation across the bank’s North American operations. With a background in science and psychology, she champions ethical AI adoption and strong governance frameworks. 

Kristin focuses on ensuring data-driven innovation enhances customer trust while modernising financial services at scale. Her work centres on balancing technological advancement with security, transparency and responsible AI practices to support long-term resilience and sustainable growth in an increasingly digital banking environment.

9. Sarah Guo

Founded: 2022

CEO: Sarah Guo

Service: a venture capital firm that backs early-stage AI companies with funding and operational support. With access to a strong network of talent, customers and investors.

8. Andrew Chin

Founded: 1967

CEO: Seth P. Bernstein

Service: a global investment management and research firm that provides asset management.

Andrew is AllianceBernstein’s first-ever Chief AI Officer. He leads the firm’s strategy to embed machine learning across asset management. 

A long-standing member of the organisation, he previously served as Chief Risk Officer. 

Andrew focuses on leveraging data science to improve investment decision-making and drive operational efficiency. His work centres on responsibly integrating advanced analytics into core financial processes, strengthening performance, risk insight and scalability across the firm’s global investment platform.

7. Marco Argenti

Founded: 1869

CEO: David M. Solomon

Service: Providing investment banking, asset and wealth banking. As well as offering financial advisory services to corporations, governments, institutions, and individuals.

Marco is a strong advocate for agentic AI in banking, promoting a future in which AI systems do not simply retrieve information but actively execute complex tasks. 

He encourages engineering teams to build and maintain personalised toolkits of AI models, supporting a shift in how work is structured. 

Marco’s view is that the role of developers is evolving from writing code in isolation to supervising, orchestrating and refining intelligent agents that can operate autonomously within financial systems and workflows.

6. Adam Lieberman

Founded: 2017

CEO: Chris Walters

Service: financial software solutions that help banks and financial institutions modernise lending, payments and core banking.

Adam leads the AI-first strategy at Finastra, focusing on open finance and applications of generative AI. 

He oversees the development of intelligent solutions that enable financial institutions to optimise lending and treasury operations. 

Adam champions a data-driven culture, ensuring advanced analytics are securely and effectively embedded within global financial infrastructure. His work centres on combining innovation with governance to scale AI capabilities across complex, regulated financial environments.

5. Shobhit Varshney

Founded: 1812

CEO: Jane Fraser

Service: helping people, businesses, and governments achieve their financial goals through a broad range of banking and financial services across the world.

Shobhit drives the adoption of generative AI across Citigroup’s institutional and consumer businesses. 

Formerly an AI leader at IBM, he focuses on modernising legacy banking systems and improving developer productivity. 

Shobhit champions a disciplined approach to innovation, ensuring AI solutions are secure, scalable and compliant, while enabling meaningful transformation across complex, regulated financial environments.

4. Rachel Schutt

Founded: 1988

CEO: Larry Fink

Service: providing investment management, risk management, and advisory services to institutional and individual clients worldwide.

Rachel leads BlackRock’s AI Labs, a central hub dedicated to applying artificial intelligence to high-stakes financial problems and investment use cases.

She is co-author of the influential book Doing Data Science and previously served as Chief Data Scientist at News Corp. 

Rachel’s central focus is on formalising rigorous data science best practices to improve alpha generation, strengthen risk management and scale responsible, high-quality analytics across the firm’s global investment and research functions.

3. Bhavesh Dayalji

Founded: 1941

CEO: Martina L. Cheung

Services: essential intelligence through data, analytics, credit ratings, and market benchmarks that help businesses, investors, and governments make informed financial and risk decisions.

Bhavesh leads S&P Global’s AI strategy and serves as CEO of Kensho. 

In his role as Chief AI Officer, he is responsible for defining S&P Global’s AI vision and enterprise-wide strategy, championing the deployment of artificial intelligence to accelerate innovation across the organisation and for its customers. 

Bhavesh focuses on scaling practical, trusted AI solutions that enhance data-driven decision-making, improve analytical workflows and unlock new capabilities across global financial markets, research and enterprise operations.

2. Teresa Heitsenrether

Founded: 2000

CEO: Jamie Dimon

Service: providing a wide range of financial services that includes, personal and business loans, credit cards, investment banking and wealth advisory services. As well as offering support to individuals, companies and institutions to manage money and grow investments globally.

Teresa leads AI adoption at JPMorgan Chase, the world’s largest bank by assets, overseeing a multi-billion-dollar technology and analytics budget that supports more than 1,000 data scientists and machine learning engineers. 

She is responsible for scaling generative AI capabilities across the enterprise, ensuring they deliver measurable business impact across fraud detection, risk management, operations and personalised wealth management at scale. 

Teresa focuses on turning advanced research into production-grade systems that operate at global scale. She also maintains stringent governance, privacy and regulatory standards, ensuring AI is deployed safely within highly regulated financial environments. 

Her leadership bridges research, engineering and business strategy to embed AI deeply into everyday banking services while sustaining trust, resilience and long-term value creation across the organisation.

1. Jeff McMillan

Founded: 1935

CEO: Ted Pick

Service: a global financial services firm that helps clients manage and grow wealth, supports corporate financing and transactions, and provides investment advice and market insights across different sectors.

Jeff serves as Head of Firmwide AI at Morgan Stanley. He is the architect behind Morgan Stanley’s partnership with OpenAI and the development of the AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant, deployed to thousands of financial advisers.

In his role, Jeff leads firmwide strategy for generative AI, focused on capturing and operationalising the firm’s institutional knowledge and making it accessible across wealth management workflows. His work aims to enhance adviser productivity, client service and decision support by embedding intelligent tools into daily practice.

Jeff is a strong advocate of a human-in-the-loop model, ensuring AI systems augment rather than replace professional judgement, with robust controls around risk, compliance and governance in a highly-regulated financial environment.