Nina Charnley Spotlight

Nina Charnley

There’s not much Nina Charnley hasn’t learned about how banks work and what they can do for clients and communities. She’s held an incredible range of leadership roles across the financial industry in her career, and, for someone who says they fell into banking, she’s become an expert sharing her knowledge and communicating the importance of financial literacy for women.

“I was actually waiting tables during the recession in the late 70’s after I graduated from college and wasn’t planning on a career in financial services. I got a position as secretary for the American Bankers Association, and that was my first contact with the world of banking. Through the opportunities that came with that over the next several years, I was hired into a legacy company in 1985 and eventually joined Fleet from Bank of Boston – and that led to Bank of America.”

A career off to a fast start

Nina’s early career was off to a fast start, and she quickly took on leadership responsibilities. She led the creation of a healthcare lending group added real estate, and initially was head of loan review for Rhode Island, where she was based. She says that gave her a way to see how banks are set up and how they operate. “As head of corporate loan review, I had exposure to the holding company, which was a great way to see how the bank works and what the holding company actually does.”

Her next roles ranged from becoming the business lead for the team building the company’s client-facing website in the early days of online banking, where Nina says she learned the importance of things like fonts to the client experience, to the trust business to help ease a 3-hour commute when her children were young, to a market leader and then to being “on loan” to communications and marketing to work through a re-brand for the Private Bank.

“If I could fix it, I’d really accomplished something”

Taking on a range of challenges began to shape Nina’s career, and she says, “I wanted the jobs no one else would take.  I prided myself on building teams – changing teams to make them work better. If I could fix it, then I’d really accomplish something. I became someone who fixes things. It’s been a great gift in my career - I was always encouraged to think strategically about how to get things done.”

Back to running a business

Eventually, Nina says that she wanted to be more directly involved in running a business. She took on a role as regional president of the team serving high net worth clients in the northeast, and jokes that, “If it snowed there, it was in my territory.” She was back to managing a balance sheet and figuring out how to make a team work together for clients. And with a passion for ensuring that every teammate had the opportunity to reach their potential, Nina created new education and training efforts and began to hold people accountable for what their teams looked like. 

Sharing knowledge and experience

After leaving Bank of America in 2009, Nina was a consultant and moved to TIAA-CREF as a senior managing director for five years. Then, she took the knowledge, experience and community spirit she had developed over her career and is now using it to help boost women’s financial confidence, guide a banking institution as a non-executive director, and coach Harvard Business School students. “When I retired I wanted to take all the financial knowledge and experience I had gained and give back – and women’s money matters.”

As a volunteer working with women to increase their financial literacy, Nina is helping women understand the power of their finances and how education boosts their confidence. “I think many of us in the banking world assume people know a lot more about their finances than they do. A little education and understanding about what you can do with your money and how powerful that can be, is a gamechanger. And we need to build women’s financial confidence with the understanding that you can be very successful, and still not be confident financially. To some, finances are a foreign language.”

For the last five years, Nina has also served as a non-executive board member for Beacon Bank and Trust, and says the experience is very different from being a part of the senior management team managing a company. “You’re there for different reasons. You’re not there to run the place, but to advise and guide. After years in the industry, I’m glad that my knowledge is useful.”

The Alumni Network

Nina says that her time at our company was foundational. “A lot of lessons and thought processes were developed at Fleet and Bank of America.” She says she continues to value the close personal friendships she built during her time with the company and likes to keep up with what’s going on. “I value the connections and the relationships I built because I think the people in your life you shared something, or fixed something, or felt good about something with – there is a community there. And shared experiences help you live a connected life.”