Gunjan Kedia and the seven-hour interview

Seven hours is a peculiar length for a job application. Long enough to become hungry. Long enough to reconsider the entire enterprise. Gunjan Kedia spent those hours in the reception area at PricewaterhouseCoopers, asking for an interview. She had finished business school with top honors. She did not have a green card. The interview invitations were failing to arrive, so she brought herself.

Years later, recounting the episode, she was matter-of-fact about the method: “literally sat there for seven hours asking for an interview.” It led to her first professional job. In the usual account of an executive career, this would be a charming prelude to the important appointments. It deserves a little more attention. Before Kedia learned to run financial businesses, she had learned the inconvenience of being easy to overlook.

Today she is chairman and chief executive officer of U.S. Bancorp, the Minneapolis-based parent of U.S. Bank. She became its first female CEO in April 2025 and added the chairmanship in April 2026. Her responsibilities now encompass a bank serving 15 million clients globally. The person once waiting to get into the room now has considerable influence over what happens inside it.

A pair of jeans, then a plane ticket

Her earliest sales target was more modest. In Delhi in 1985, Kedia sold air fresheners door to door because she wanted a new pair of jeans. She discovered that approaching strangers did not trouble her and that making a persuasive case could be enjoyable. Denim has financed less useful educations.

She went on to study engineering in Delhi, where women were scarce in the program. Being one of the few was part of the attraction. Later, she crossed to finance, earning her graduate business degree at Carnegie Mellon in 1994. Both her engineering and business degrees were awarded with distinction. The academic record was tidy; the transition between countries was less straightforward.

There was a family reason for the move. Her father had an opportunity at the World Bank and moved to Washington with her mother. Her sister went to New York University. Kedia, still studying in India, wanted to join them in the United States. Pittsburgh was a route toward family as well as a qualification. The neatly purposeful career story looks rather different when you put the relatives back into it.

At Carnegie Mellon, friends and classmates helped her interpret unfamiliar professional customs, including meals and conversations about American sports. An interview can demand an extraordinary amount of knowledge that never appears in the job description. She came to see that understanding a prospective employer’s business, and explaining how she could help it, gave her something firmer to stand on.

“Life in the C-suite is really one of real humility.”Gunjan Kedia, speaking at Carnegie Mellon, 2021

The education behind the appointments

PwC was followed by McKinsey, where Kedia became a partner and a leader in the financial services practice. Consulting put her close to the problems of financial institutions. Her subsequent jobs put her inside the institutions themselves, responsible for businesses whose services are often more familiar to professional investors than to people visiting a neighborhood branch.

In 2004 she joined the business now known as BNY, becoming executive vice president and head of global product management in global asset servicing. At State Street, she led investment servicing in the Americas and served on its Managing Committee. These were jobs in the working machinery of finance: products and services that help institutions administer investments and carry out their business.

That background matters to the story of her arrival at U.S. Bancorp in 2016. She initially led Wealth Management and Investment Services. In 2023 her responsibilities broadened to Wealth, Corporate, Commercial and Institutional Banking. A customer thinking about retirement and an institution managing a pool of investments have different needs. Kedia’s remit increasingly required her to understand both.

The presidency, announced in May 2024, made that breadth explicit. She would oversee all three revenue lines: consumer and business banking; payment services; and wealth, corporate, commercial and institutional banking. The assignment was to make those businesses work together around the client. Organization charts are good at drawing boundaries. Customers are under no obligation to respect them.

Her promotion also came with a history of recognition. By the 2024 announcement, she had twice appeared on Barron’s list of influential women in U.S. finance. Carnegie Mellon had given her its alumni achievement award in 2018 and professional excellence award in 2022. The awards mark the public milestones. The increasingly broad operating assignments explain how she reached the next one.

Money has a vocabulary problem

One revealing part of Kedia’s work predates the CEO title. In 2020, U.S. Bank published research on women and wealth, drawing on a survey of 3,000 women and men. The questions concerned hopes, worries, financial education and engagement with money. Kedia’s introduction described a gap between women’s growing financial power and how fully they were engaging with their finances.

Her response went beyond asking women to acquire more confidence. In a banking podcast that year, she argued that the industry’s language was failing to connect. Clients might want to discuss what their money could accomplish, while the adviser was concentrating on the number. A technically sound conversation can still miss the person sitting across the table.

There is a practical business argument here. If an institution misunderstands how customers describe their ambitions, it will struggle to serve them. There is also a matter of respect. Someone saving for a future has a reason for saving. Asking about that reason may tell a banker more than another chart. Kedia wanted financial literacy and conversations about money to become more open, with more people able to participate.

Her own public advice has extended to negotiating pay and talking to children about money. These subjects sit some distance from the ceremony of a quarterly earnings call. They belong in the same biography, though. They concern the ordinary conversations through which people gain, or surrender, some control over their financial lives.

The job after the first

When Kedia succeeded Andy Cecere on April 15, 2025, the first-woman milestone was a fact of the appointment. The next morning brought an earnings call and more immediate questions. She identified three priorities: controlled expenses, organic growth and a transformation of the payments business. The title was new. The work came with existing targets and shareholders waiting for results.

Her approach included making better use of investments already made in technology, expanding payments and seeking growth. Banking does not give its leaders the luxury of improving one thing at a time. Spending needs discipline while capabilities need investment. Customers expect convenience while the institution must manage risk. An attractive plan still has to survive that collection of competing demands.

In January 2026, the board announced that Kedia would also become chairman after the April annual meeting, with Cecere retiring from the board. Lead independent director Roland Hernandez would remain in that role. The succession had moved from an executive handover to a change in board leadership, a year after she took charge of the company.

Then came an expansion with a name attached. U.S. Bancorp completed its BTIG acquisition on June 1, 2026. BTIG brought capabilities including institutional equity sales and trading, equity capital markets, electronic trading and mergers-and-acquisitions advice. Anton LeRoy remained BTIG’s CEO, reporting to U.S. Bancorp vice chair Stephen Philipson. BTIG would operate as a separate broker-dealer within the group.

By October, the bank was reporting a full quarter of BTIG results. Third-quarter net revenue reached $7.97 billion, and diluted earnings per share were $1.34, up 9.8 percent from a year earlier. Capital markets revenue rose 69.3 percent, with the acquisition contributing to that change. The distinction matters: buying a business expands reported activity as well as the range of services available to clients.

The figures provide an early measure of the bank under her leadership, rather than a final verdict on it. Kedia has also overseen new relationships with the NFL and Amazon. At a September 2026 event, she discussed restoring confidence inside the company while moving beyond its history. Her warning was succinct: “You should never let your past glory or your past tradition become a prison.”

The chemistry lesson that stayed

For an executive responsible for so much formal machinery, Kedia has a pleasingly informal piece of advice tucked away. Her high-school chemistry teacher used to tell students that friends and laughter made tough assignments easier. Kedia has carried the lesson into management, connecting enjoyment at work with speed and trust between teammates. Even a bank is staffed by people who prefer a good afternoon to a miserable one.

Outside the executive role, her board commitments include PBS, the American Red Cross and Carnegie Mellon’s business school. Her stated interests include travel, family, reading, movies and fashion. The girl raising money for jeans has retained an interest in clothes. More consequentially, she has retained an interest in how people find their way into unfamiliar settings and learn to function there.

The reception-area story can tempt a reader toward a tidy moral about persistence. Her later career makes it more interesting. Getting heard is one skill. Hearing other people is another. Kedia’s responsibilities now demand both, across employees, clients, directors and shareholders. The seven-hour wait belongs to the beginning of that education. The bank is where the lessons keep arriving.