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s vice chair of Bank of America, she’s one of the most powerful women in the business world. But when Anne Finucane ’74 was a student at UNH, she thought she’d be an artist — a path she forswore after she took a painting course at the Paul Creative Arts Center and concluded that she wasn’t the top student in the class. “I’m competitive,” Finucane recalls, “and I realized I was never going to be as good as the most talented art students there, no matter how hard I tried, so what was the point?”
The point, arguably, was that her destiny lay elsewhere: in a string of job opportunities that she embraced, excelled at, and inexorably parlayed into a leadership role in the rarefied realm of global finance. Finucane’s own explanation, however, is quite different.
“People evolve,” she says. “You take what you learn at one moment, and you apply it to the next challenge and turn it into something else. When I graduated from UNH, I never would have thought I’d do anything in business. That all came much later.”
Beyond Bank of America, Finucane serves on corporate and nonprofit boards of directors that span from The Ireland Funds to Carnegie Hall to Mass General Brigham Healthcare. Unsurprisingly, she’s a regular on both Fortune and Forbes magazines’ most powerful women lists as well as American Banker’s 25 Most Powerful Women in Banking list. What is surprising, perhaps, is that when asked about the recognition she’s received for her accomplishments, Finucane describes herself as conflicted.
Finucane got her start with Bank of America in the mid-1990s at a predecessor bank, Fleet Financial Group (an organization that she had also joined in the course of an acquisition — that of Shawmut Group, one of the many Boston-area companies to which she provided strategic consulting services following the birth of her fourth child). Though she had planned to step off the fast track as a member of the management team at Boston-based marketing agency Hill Holiday in favor of consulting to better balance the demands of work and motherhood (Finucane’s fourth-born, a son, was a surprise; his arrival was publicly documented by her husband, MSNBC commentator and former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle), her roles at Fleet and Bank of America have been the very definition of fast track.
Finucane is remarkably candid as she reflects on the challenge of rebuilding Bank of America’s once-lofty reputation. “It’s a greater challenge than having to build your reputation from scratch,” she says. “We had disappointed people.”
The work entailed addressing the issues that drove the bank’s stumble in the first place — and took much longer than Finucane anticipated. While the business itself had recovered by 2013, “redeeming our reputation took longer,” she says. “It was 2016 before we could really look around and say that we were where we needed to be.”
“Brian’s position was, ‘Given that this is broken, why don’t we look at everything, not just one thing?’” she says. The strategy came down to the concept of responsible growth: reevaluating lines of business and ensuring that all of the bank’s practices were aligned with its moral principles. Finucane describes her contribution to the process as “distinguishing the dominant from the recessive genes” driving that responsible growth. As chief strategy officer, that entailed synthesizing the work being done in every area of the bank, from consumer and investment banking to wealth management to human resources. It also meant making the call on moves such as eliminating overdraft fees on debit card purchases and instead rejecting purchases that would otherwise trigger such fees — a “watershed” event that earned Finucane praise from the Center for Responsible Lending. After operating in what she described in a 2012 New York Times article as a “very distracted environment with a lot of finger-pointing and a lot of missteps,” Finucane oversaw the work that went into articulating the new course that Moynihan had set.
A transfer student, she arrived at UNH in the spring of 1971 following a semester at a small Catholic women’s college in New York that both she and her parents knew immediately was a bad fit. “I think my parents would have driven me home right away if they could,” she recalls. The fourth of six children raised in a tight-knit Irish-American family from Newton, Massachusetts, Finucane set her sights on finding a college in a rural setting that would allow her to study both fine arts and liberal arts and would also keep her close enough to Boston to ski and continue a pastime she’d adopted during her stint in New York: traveling — by bus, plane, car or train — around the East Coast. “UNH fit the bill,” she says, “and I made some life-long friends.”
After graduating with honors, she found herself at a crossroads, sure she didn’t want to be an art teacher or illustrator but not sure what she did want to be. She took a job in Boston with Mayor Kevin White’s Bicentennial Commission, and after the bicentennial stayed on in the mayor’s Cultural Affairs office. From City Hall, it was a short leap to Boston television station WBZ, where Finucane climbed the ranks to become creative services director, and then on to Hill Holliday as an executive producer and then director of creative services.
By that point, however, she had married Barnicle (“the best decision I ever made,” she says) and had three children in five years, and she knew she couldn’t keep traveling. “I just couldn’t do it anymore,” she says, even though stepping back meant watching other colleagues get ahead of her. “I had young kids, and too many responsibilities.” After 14 successful years in senior management at Hill Holliday, and shortly after the birth of her fourth child, she shifted to consulting for Hill Holliday, which quickly led to engagements with Partners HealthCare (the Boston-based integrated health system now known as Mass General Brigham), Shawmut Bank and its acquirer Fleet Bank. Less than two years later, she was in a senior role at Fleet, well on her way to Bank of America’s executive suite.
Learning how to do things also played a role in the bank’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this year. Drawing on hard lessons about humility and prioritization learned during its own crisis in 2008-09, Finucane says, Bank of America was able to quickly assess and prioritize consumer needs that were arising as the pandemic brought the U.S. economy to a near standstill. When the U.S. Congress introduced the Paycheck Protection Program, for example, the bank was able to quickly assess the program’s merit and embrace it, which ultimately led to Bank of America producing the greatest amount of loans to the greatest number of small businesses among its banking peers. The bank also offered a comprehensive deferral program for loan customers and disbursed some $100 million of philanthropic funds for the sole purpose of providing emergency funding related to food insecurity, health care and PPE, on top of the $250 million in philanthropic support the bank gives annually. Following the May death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which Finucane says threw into stark relief the acute issues of racial injustice, Bank of America committed a further $1 billion over four years supporting the areas of health care, affordable housing, workforce development and support for small businesses focused on minority communities across the nation.
While these are complex and complicated issues, Finucane says the argument for tackling them is remarkably simple. “If you’re part of a solution, there’s a level of trust, and that’s ultimately of benefit to any company. It’s philanthropic, but goes way beyond that. It’s about leveraging your size and position to provide informed solutions to problems that impact literally millions of people.”
“Maybe that sounds corny. Maybe I don’t want to say that,” she muses. “But I’m proud of my kids. You know? Your children are your greatest outcomes and they’re also your greatest critics. And I hope that they’re a reflection of something we accomplish.”