Arundhati Bhattacharya

Bhattacharya will soon begin the final leg of her three-year term atop SBI, the government-controlled bank. India’s largest bank, SBI accounts for nearly a quarter of all lending in the country. Bhattacharya, the first woman to head up the 209-year-old institution has focused on improving SBI’s finances—she inherited a number of bad loans —and modernizing the organization, both in terms of more female-friendly work practices and digital-age technologies. It’s a lot of responsibility: SBI and ICICI, the bank headed by #1 MPW Kochhar, were deemed “systemically important”—i.e. too big to fail—by the Reserve Bank of India in August. —Erika Fry