Opening Doors to Global Possibilities, Women in Banking & Finance

By Gloria Romano-Barrera

Across major financial institutions such as HSBC, Capital One and Chase, women are playing an increasingly influential role in shaping the future of banking. As more women enter and advance within the financial industry, they are bringing diverse perspectives, innovative leadership, and a strong commitment to expanding opportunity in a field that has historically been male-dominated. Their voices, cultural insights, and leadership are helping redefine the industry, while also creating pathways for the next generation of women to thrive in banking and financial services. Among these executives are Teresa Bain, Director of Global Supplier Operations at Capital One, Melissa Acosta Hotzoglou, Managing Director and Head of Corporate Sales, U.S. Markets and Securities Services at HSBC, and Phuong Martinez, Business Relationship Manager at Chase. Each has forged a unique path into the financial industry, bringing with them stories of perseverance, cultural pride, and a commitment to opening doors for the next generation.

As the presence of women in finance continues to expand, their impact reaches far beyond corporate boardrooms. Through mentorship, advocacy, and leadership, these women are not only advancing their own careers but also helping create a more inclusive and representative future for the banking industry.

Melissa Acosta Hotzoglou, Managing Director, Head of Corporate Sales, U.S., Markets & Securities Services, HSBC

Melissa Acosta Hotzoglou’s journey to the upper ranks of global markets did not begin on a trading floor. It began at a kitchen table in Queens, NY, where she watched her parents sort through bills, write checks, and walk together to the neighborhood bank branch each Friday. Those moments instilled early lessons in discipline, responsibility, and sacrifice. Values that would quietly shape her leadership philosophy long before she ever entered finance. Today, as Managing Director in Markets & Securities Services (MSS) and Head of Corporate Sales for HSBC in the U.S., Acosta Hotzoglou oversees complex foreign exchange and interest rate strategies for some of the world’s largest corporations.

Photo cover: Melissa Acosta Hotzoglou, Managing Director, Head of Corporate Sales, U.S. HSBC. Photo by: Peahead Prints Photography.

While her role spans global markets and sophisticated risk solutions, her leadership remains deeply grounded in those early experiences, where preparation mattered, trust was earned, and accountability was non-negotiable.

“What fascinated me most was the structure,” she recalls. “The order, the professionalism, the sense of purpose inside a bank.”

That early exposure planted a seed. One that would later grow into a career defined by analytical rigor, commercial impact, and global leadership.

As a child, Acosta Hotzoglou imagined a future in communications. She grew up watching the news with her grandparents, captivated by how information moved people and shaped decisions. Her dream job was meteorology, an early signal of what would later become a defining strength: the ability to assess risk, anticipate outcomes, and prepare for what lies ahead.

Melissa Acosta Hotzoglou with her parents, Carlos Arturo Acosta and Maria Isabel Acosta.

As a first-generation American, her parents encouraged a path they understood to be stable and practical, but they never put labels or limits on what she could achieve. Instead, they strengthened her to never let others define her boundaries either. At the same time, they were deeply intentional about anchoring her in her cultural roots, believing that her heritage would not hold her back but propel her forward.

“They wanted me to understand that who I am and where I come from are not barriers,” she says. “They are the very things that made me who I am.” In college, she pursued a dual major in finance and economics, complemented by a minor in psychology, a combination that would later become a leadership advantage.

“Looking back, psychology is probably the most useful part of my degree,” she adds. “I use it every day, in how I interact with clients, teams, and partners.”

Her professional journey began at JPMorgan Chase, where an internship introduced her to the fast-paced world of foreign exchange. One interview moment proved pivotal. Growing up, she spent summers in Costa Rica visiting family. Before each trip, her father would give the children a small amount of money to spend. In San

José, they would visit El Banco Central de Costa Rica to exchange U.S. dollars for colones.

Outside the building, a large sign clearly displayed the exchange rate.

“When I interviewed for my internship, I mentioned spending time in Costa Rica,” she recalls. “The interviewer, who I later learned was the head of global trading, picked up on it.”

He asked her, “What’s the currency of Costa Rica?” “Colón,” she answered.

Then he asked, “What happens when the exchange rate goes up?” “You get more colones for each dollar,” she replied. He paused and asked one more question: “What happens when the opposite happens?” “You don’t change your dollars,” she said. “That’s how I ended up in FX,” she reflects.

That moment, connecting lived experience with financial intuition, opened the door to a career that would span two decades at JPMorgan Chase, where Acosta Hotzoglou would ultimately go on to lead the very business she entered as an intern.

While global markets formed the foundation of her career, Acosta Hotzoglou made a deliberate decision to step into the consumer bank to push her own development beyond institutional finance. The move allowed her to translate what she had learned advising global corporations, risk management, access, trust, and financial empowerment, down to the individual consumer. In that role, she led a consumer strategy focused on expanding access for Black and Hispanic communities. She helped launch fully Spanish-language account-opening processes and played a key role in one of the firm’s first end-to-end in-language marketing campaigns. “Being featured in that campaign was a personal highlight,” Acosta Hotzoglou says. “My family, my friends, and my daughters saw me speaking about work that mattered, work that was making banking more accessible to communities that are often underserved. That moment made everything feel very real.”

It was also a moment that allowed her to bring her full self to work, professionally, culturally, and personally. Today, Acosta Hotzoglou leads within HSBC’s global Markets division, overseeing FX and interest rate risk solutions that range from everyday cross-border payments to complex, multi-billion-dollar M&A and capital markets transactions. Publicly traded companies rely on her team to protect earnings, manage volatility, and enable growth across currency and interest rate markets.

“Our goal is to help companies grow and achieve their ambitions internationally, while managing the risks that come with operating globally,” she explains. “At HSBC, I’ve been able to demonstrate what it means to lead on a global stage, as an American and as an American Latina.”

Acosta Hotzoglou is a member of HSBC’s Global Corporate Sales Executive Committee and serves on the MSS Americas Executive Committee. She also serves as an executive sponsor for HLDC, the Hispanic Latin Diversity Committee, HSBC’s Hispanic employee resource group, reinforcing her commitment to mentorship, representation, and community within the firm.

Throughout her ascent, Acosta Hotzoglou often found herself as the only Latina in the room. Rather than viewing that as a limitation, she treated it as a responsibility, one she takes seriously for those coming behind her.

“For me, success is seeing the next generation of Latina leaders be more fierce, more direct, and more confident in their career journeys,” she says. “I want them to take up space, use their voices, and move forward without apologizing for their ambition.”

If that journey leads them to a trading floor, or any room where decisions are made, Acosta Hotzoglou wants them to see in her that their ambition is attainable.

“These spaces are not closed to you,” she says. “You belong here.” At the center of her journey is her mother, whom she describes as her number one believer, supporter, confidant, and coach. While her mother did not grow up in finance, she consistently created space for Acosta Hotzoglou to talk things through, challenged her to look at situations from different angles, and, most importantly, never allowed her to give up on herself.

“That belief made all the difference,” she says. “It taught me resilience, perspective, and the confidence to keep going.”

Teresa Bain Director, Global Supplier Operations Capital One

Photo credit: Joel Villa.

When Teresa Bain talks about her career in finance, she doesn’t start with numbers or markets. She starts with chemistry. Long before she became Director of Global Partner Services at Capital One, Bain was a young woman in Mexico, studying chemistry and pharmacology. Banking wasn’t on the horizon then. Science was. But as life unfolded, that early STEM foundation quietly prepared her for a very different kind of lab, the global corporate world. For Bain, the leap from chemistry to finance isn’t a contradiction; it’s a continuation of the same purpose.

“My education was in chemistry and pharmacology. So certainly the banking industry was not a thing that was on the horizon at the moment,” she says. A scientist by training, a builder of opportunity by calling, Bain was born and raised in Mexico. A “proud daughter of Mexico,” as she describes herself, Bain grew up in a family where community, generosity, and humanity were non‑negotiable values, even when resources were scarce.

“I grew up seeing my parents supporting the community in many different ways, even when we had to split our own meal to help others,” she states. “I always think that we can accomplish much more when we are surrounded by people than when we try to do it ourselves. And so, family foundation, which is pretty strong within our own cultures, and carrying that concept throughout is fundamental.”

“In my role as a director of a global operation, I get the opportunity to influence

the creation of jobs around many communities and many geographies. Most

recently, one of the geographies where we have this opportunity is Mexico,”

- Teresa Bain, Director, Global Supplier Operations, Capital One.

As a young adult, she migrated to the United States, and life circumstances changed. Bain had to start her education over, beginning with ESL classes and then attending college at night. Over time, she earned multiple degrees related to the financial industry. She shares that what initially brought her into the financial field wasn’t a grand plan; it was simply taking a job while she figured out what she wanted to do next.

What began as a temporary job in banking, “just until I find the next thing I really want to do, ”slowly became a career that has now spanned over 20 years. She moved through multiple departments, constantly raising her hand for roles she’d never done before, fueled by a drive to learn.

“I once thought I would be a great project manager, but through pursuing certifications, I realized that path wasn’t truly aligned with what I wanted to do,” she shares. “Throughout my career journey, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to step into a variety of roles, many of which were entirely new to me, and often in spaces where I didn’t have a traditional background. What I did have was drive, the willingness, and determination to learn.”

Teresa Bain with her daughter, Magdalena (Maggie) Alvarez, and husband Keith Bain. June 2025.

Bain joined Capital One in 2020 and has over 20 years of experience in the financial services industry. In her role, she oversees more than 6,000 Associates across eight countries and all Lines of Business in Card. Bain has an extensive background that includes Workforce Management, Quality, Vendor and Project Management. She is a Certified Scrum Master and has other licenses in project management (six sigma). Her Education is in Chemistry, Psychology and Business Management. Bain is a big advocate of Capital One’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging agenda and is a member of the Hola BRG and Voices.

Bain’s scientific mindset never left her. Today, she sees a direct link between the way chemistry works and the way organizations, communities, and financial systems function. “When you think about chemistry, it’s about things that can coexist and things that cannot coexist, or things that you can mix and match to create medicine to make people better,” she shares. “It’s really not different in the corporate environment. It’s just a different venue.”

In her current role, leading global operations and partnerships across multiple countries, she no longer works with molecules, but instead focuses on people from diverse cultures and backgrounds, products and services that can expand financial access, and communities that benefit when jobs and opportunities are created.

“How do we create opportunities for people to become financially proficient?” she shares. “Because people who are financially educated can create better lives for themselves… and contribute to the community.”

For Bain, education, opportunity, and inclusion form a clear framework for advancing better lives. While the work now operates at a global scale, the mission remains focused on delivering meaningful, measurable impact for people and communities.

“It’s very similar,” she shares. “It’s just different ingredients and obviously very different venues. But at the end of the day, I think the purpose is the same, which is, how do we create just better in every way, better people, better opportunities, better environments, better processes.”

Bain was drawn to Capital One because of its mission of bringing humanity to banking. Aligning with Bain’s values, her work now centers on partner services and global operations, helping create and support jobs across eight different countries, including a recent, deeply personal milestone: job creation in Mexico, her home country.

“The mission of the organization is bringing humanity to banking, and that truly resonated with me,” she shares. “I have been very fortunate here at Capital One to also have the opportunity to do multiple roles in which they continue to enhance that path that’s important for me, which is the path of learning and helping.”

Over more than 20 years in the industry, she has taken on roles she never imagined, often without a traditional background for them, but always with drive, curiosity, and humility. Recently, one of her proudest achievements has been helping create jobs in Mexico, closing a personal and professional circle.

“In my role as a director of a global operation, I get the opportunity to influence the creation of jobs around many communities and many geographies. Most recently, one of the geographies where we have this opportunity is Mexico,” she shares. “And of course, that is one of the moments that has become pivotal and very important because this is where I’m from. When I go to places, and I see the impact that we make on job creation, the impact on those communities, on those families, that is very dear to me. And having been able to do that in Mexico has definitely been a highlight of my career.”

In many ways, she has taken the precision and intention of chemistry and applied it to economic empowerment: carefully combining the right partners, roles, and investments to create an outcome that heals communities the way medicine heals patients.

Bain’s journey into leadership wasn’t linear, and it wasn’t just about ambition. A pivotal moment came not in a boardroom, but at home, with her then eight- year-old daughter.

Bain was actively involved in business resource groups at previous companies, including Hispanic and Latino organizations. One day, her daughter challenged her thinking. A moment where a single statement became a turning point.

“She said, being a participant is important, but being a leader is what creates change,” she shares. “In that moment…I decided that we could no longer participate if we wanted to create meaningful change. And I started investing differently, not just in my career, but in the contributions to business resource groups, the community, the teams that I was leading at the time.”

Her scientist’s mindset showed up again, this time in how she designed her life. She experimented with time, priorities, and trade-offs to raise her daughter, Magdalena (Maggie) Alvarez, while continuing to prepare herself for the global leadership role she holds today.

“You have to have your priorities straight,” she advises. “You have to be very intentional with your time, but you have to prepare yourself for when the time comes, so that you can continue the growth of your professional aspirations, while setting a very strong foundation, in this case, for my daughter.”

Today, her daughter, Maggie, is a young adult and, as Bain describes, an inspiration in her own right, someone she now looks up to. Bain admits that when she first came to the U.S., she struggled with her identity, her accent, feeling “different,” and not always understanding cultural references. Over time, however, that shifted into deep pride in her heritage.

“My heritage is something that I’m extremely proud of today, and certainly has shaped how I see myself professionally,” she shares. “It’s that heritage that has instilled the values of being genuine, being human, being supportive of others, and being able to celebrate others’ success as much as if it were yours. We need to continue to open paths…elevating others and celebrating their success. When our communities flourish, we all win.”