Founded in 1956, FWA and its 1,000 members are committed to shaping leaders in business and finance, with a special emphasis on the role and development of women. The FWA serves its members – with well over 100 educational programs and networking opportunities each year – and also serves its communities through scholarship, internship, mentoring and training programs.

The FWA mirrors the dynamic financial services industry, with a diverse membership that covers the breadth and depth of occupations in that field. The very large majority of its members hold senior positions of influence within their companies; showing its comprehensiveness, however, FWA members are divided between very large companies and small, privately-owned businesses.

FWA’s 28 committees show its dynamic mix of subjects of interest to businesswomen, from Career Connections to Education and Issues of the Day; from Emerging Leaders to Entrepreneurs to International Affairs; from Mentoring to Working Mothers to Lifestyles. A review of the FWA’s calendar shows the breadth of its dozens of offerings: breakfast and distinguished speakers meetings with the CEOs of Deloitte, Reuters Group, Standard & Poor’s and NYSE Group; dinners with directors of public companies; Entrepreneur Success workshops; and programs in working across cultures, speed networking and mastering professional politics and alliances (to list just a sample) were combined with the annual summit on professional coaching, joining members with potential coaches; corporate board advocacy and referrals, and an emphasis on corporate governance; and seminars on personal interest issues.

One of the FWA’s major commitments is to the future’s businesswomen, shown by its emphasis in mentoring, training and scholarship. Its Emerging Leaders committee started a new mentoring program this year, pairing members who are emerging leaders in companies with seasoned FWA members to provide professional and personal mentoring. The award-winning one-on-one mentoring program for high school students has been in place for more than 20 years; FWA’s newer, but already-successful, college mentoring program has enjoyed rapid growth. The separate scholarship program has given well over 100 awards to high school students for their college education, and to graduate students pursuing degrees in finance, business administration or international business. In each of the last three years, a subsidiary of Bank of Montreal has designated the scholarship program as one of the beneficiaries of its yearly donation of a day’s institutional equities commissions from trades on Wall Street – resulting in the funding of over $625,000 for FWA scholarships. And FWA has strengthened and grown its Microfinance efforts. Working with Women’s World Banking and Accion, it established a scholarship program for women from microfinance organizations, enabling women from around the world to come to the US for leadership development and business training in special seminars designed with the Wharton and Harvard Business Schools. Three scholarships were presented this year through the Lenore C. Albom Microfinance Program (named for the former FWA President and TIAW Treasurer, who was involved with TIAW’s Microfinance Committee).

For 23 years, FWA’s annual International Business Conference has brought members and delegates together with business representatives and government leaders of countries literally across the globe. This year, FWA traveled to Viet Nam. And its gala Annual Dinner honors women who are making a critical impact on the financial world today, and recognizes outstanding mentoring-program students who will make their mark in the future. Typically over 700 members and guests attend the Annual Dinner; this year the FWA honored Anne Mulcahy (Chairman/CEO of Xerox) and Kathryn Fuller (Chair of the Ford Foundation) as the FWA Women of the Year for the Private Sector and the Public Sector, respectively.

As the FWA enters its second half-century, TIAW is pleased to commend it for its significant and achievement-filled history and looks forward to sharing the future with this very special network member and friend of TIAW.