Thasunda Brown Duckett, TIAA [Video]

Company: TIAATitle: President & Chief Executive OfficerIndustry: FinancialsHometown: Rochester, New YorkNotable in 2023: Raised awareness of the racial retirement gap and the women’s retirement gap.

Since joining TIAA in 2021, Duckett, one of only two Black female CEOs of a Fortune 500 company, has pushed to make the retirement industry giant’s expertise available to more Americans.

TIAA, which began in 1918 as a retirement program for teachers founded by Andrew Carnegie, manages over $1 trillion in assets and now reaches millions of Americans beyond the eduction sector and across demographics that often go underrepresented, as well as over 12,000 institutional partners.

In 2023, the company saw record-high operating margins and the rapid adoption of its RetirePlus investment product, which offers a guaranteed income in retirement in addition to investment growth. Assets in the program are now over $30 billion across 400,000 individual participants and nearly 500 institutional partners. The …