7. Elizabeth McCaul

Formerly the superintendent of banks of the state of New York, Elizabeth McCaul now uses her financial and regulatory expertise to advise clients throughout the United States and Europe how to handle risk management, corporate governance, and capital markets. She’s overseen financial institutions with $2 trillion in assets, some of the world’s largest, including most of the foreign banks operating in America. After 9/11, McCaul worked with banks, securities firms and the Federal Reserve to reopen the U.S. markets as quickly as possible to restore confidence in the economy, here and abroad. She’s familiar with all the fine details and mandates of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and U.S.A. Patriot Act, and has helped federal regulators and top law enforcement officials craft mechanisms to help secure the entire U.S. banking system from being used for financial terrorism. She also spent a decade at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. At the Financial Stability Institute at the Bank for International Settlements, McCaul was a top instructor on corporate governance and she was a respected member of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. Founded in 2001, Promontory is one of the world’s leading strategy, risk management and regulatory compliance consulting firms focused primarily on the financial services industry, with offices in more than 50 countries on six continents. Among many other accomplishments, McCaul led a forensic review of the Instituto per le Opere di Religione (the Institute for Religious Works), also known as the Vatican bank, and has been credited with helping clean up its money-laundering and tax-avoidance reputation, ultimately assissting its core mission of providing banking services for the Catholic church and ensuring its charity reaches all corners of the globe.