Over 90 years, more than 26,000 graduates of the ABA Stonier Graduate School of Banking have brought leadership and vision to their banks and to the industry. To commemorate Stonier’s 90th anniversary, we are highlighting nine remarkable Stonier graduates.
— THE EDITORS
David M. Kennedy
David Kennedy began his career as a staffer for Federal Reserve Board Chairman Marriner Eccles. After graduating from Stonier in 1939, he left the Federal Reserve to join Continental Illinois in Chicago, rising to become chairman and CEO from 1959 to 1969. That year, he accepted President Nixon’s nomination to be the 60th Treasury secretary, serving until 1971. Kennedy’s career in public service also included serving as U.S. ambassador to NATO. As a volunteer leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, he also advised the church on restructuring Zions Bank — then owned by the LDS church — to shift to a modern management structure in which the president of the church would no longer also be the president of the bank.
Emily H. Womach
Womach began her banking career in 1945 as a bookkeeper at a Delaware community bank. She became a leader in the National Association of Bank Women and rose in ranks in Delaware banking. In 1970, she was elected as a Democrat to statewide office as treasurer. After returning to the private sector, she was tapped to join a group of women starting their own bank in the nation’s capital. Chartered in 1977 and one of nine so-called “women’s banks” in the country, the Women’s National Bank was the first women’s bank to become a Federal Reserve member. Its impetus came from a professional woman who, Womach later related, had applied for a loan from her bank and been turned down — even though she believed she qualified. Womach led the bank to a profit in its first year, and she remained president until injuries from a 1983 car accident led her to step down. The bank remained in business
Bill Synnott
Massachusetts banker Bill Synnott entered banking in the 1950s, just as data — in the primitive form of mainframe computing — was beginning to transform the financial services industry. By the 1980s, he was head of management information systems at Bank of Boston. In a 1981 book called Information Resource Management, he and a co-author coined the term “chief information officer,” which has gone on to become not just a popular senior executive title but one that reflects the integration of data, technology and business strategy at the top of American business.
Arturo L. Carrión Muñoz
Arturo Carrión Muñoz spent six decades in banking. He worked from 1955 to 1986 at Banco Popular, then worked until 2015 as EVP (the chief executive) of the Puerto Rico Bankers Association. Along the way, Carrión led the organizing committee for the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan and contributed to the development of Puerto Rico tourism and manufacturing.
Betsy Duke
Elizabeth Ashburn Duke began her career as a part-time bank teller in Virginia Beach, and she quickly rose through the ranks. Within 17 years she was CEO of the Bank of Tidewater, which was eventually acquired by Wachovia. Shortly after the acquisition, Duke was elected the first-ever female ABA chair, serving from 2004 to 2005. In 2008, she began a five-year stint on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, where she represented community bank interests. After leaving the Fed board, Duke served as vice chair and then chair of the board of Wells Fargo, leading that bank through a restructuring as the first female board chair of a major U.S. bank.
John A. Allison IV
John Allison joined BB&T in 1971 and graduated from Stonier in the 1970s as his career accelerated. He was appointed CEO of the North Carolina regional bank in 1989, and during his nearly two-decade tenure, he grew the bank’s assets 33-fold to $152 billion. Allison also became famous for his advocacy for a particular strain of free-market economics — handing all new BB&T executives a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and prizing “an uncompromising commitment to reason” in decision-making. Under Allison, BB&T underwrote numerous academic centers at universities in the BB&T footprint dedicated to the “moral foundations of capitalism.”
Emma Chappell
When Emma Chappell was growing up, her Philadelphia pastor noticed her mathematical abilities — and encouraged her to pursue a career in banking. She joined a bank as a clerk in 1959 after completing high school. She went on to college, became a bank officer and by 1977, she had become the first Black vice president at Continental Bank. After graduating from Stonier in the 1980s, she was approached by a group of Black leaders in Philadelphia about starting a minority-owned bank. The United Bank of Philadelphia — still in business to this day — opened in 1992 under Chappell’s leadership. She was the first Black woman to found a commercial bank, as well as the first to launch any bank since Maggie Walker in 1903.
Esther George
A 1994 Stonier graduate, Esther George spent more than four decades at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. She led the bank’s supervision and risk management unit and chaired the group of Fed officials who oversaw community bank supervision across the Fed system. From 2011 to 2023, George was president and CEO of the Kansas City Fed.
Julieann Thurlow
Massachusetts banker and former ABA chair Julie Thurlow attended the National School of Banking, which merged with Stonier following ABA’s 2007 merger with America’s Community Banks, and the
schools today share their history and alumni base. She joined Reading Cooperative Bank in 1993 and has been president and CEO of the mutual savings institution since 2006. She has championed the ability of community banks to innovate for themselves — co-developing a new payment network through her participation in Alloy Labs, serving as founding chair of ABA’s Core Platforms Committee and developing new products to serve the underbanked in downtrodden Massachusetts cities.
