In conversation with Fiona Gallagher, Chief Executive Officer, Wells Fargo

Q: Can you share your professional journey to date?

What has enabled you to achieve such an incredible career?"I put my career into stages: I left Ireland in 1998, immediately after university. I went to New York and started working in the analyst training programme in capital markets at Merrill Lynch. I was working on issuing bonds for clients, so I got to see how the financial markets worked. For me, it really brought finance to life. I worked at Merrill Lynch and at Barclays in New York. While with Barclays, they asked me to move to London to become Head of Private Placements, Europe. I went from being the deal person to making that first step into management, another important stage in my career. I was with Barclays for about a year, then the team moved to Deutsche Bank and I joined as European Head of Private Placements. Later, I was asked to be Head of Global Relationship Management, looking across all of the clients we had in Capital Markets and Treasury Solutions; client interactions; how we were making money, how were we looking after clients. It was a much bigger management role for me, with around 2,000 people brought together into this new group. Although I really enjoyed working at Deutsche, one of the main attractions of moving to Wells Fargo two years ago was the opportunity to build something. The other was my continued desire to learn."

Key quotes from Fiona on:

Key leadership characteristics

Advice for aspiring leaders

Gender balance in the industry

Effective communication

This is a short excerpt from the full interview available to download as part of FinSight magazine.