Alison Rose

A year ago, Rose became the first woman to run one of Britain’s four big lenders, breaking a financial-industry glass ceiling—and taking on one crisis cleanup job just as another crisis began. In February, Rose announced plans to rebrand Royal Bank of Scotland as NatWest Group, seeking to end the legacy of the bank’s 2008 government bailout as the pandemic started to roil the global economy and led NatWest to swing to a pretax loss of $1.7 billion in the second quarter. Yet despite the ongoing business and economic challenges, Rose hasn’t lost her focus on climate change and sustainability. She vowed in February to make NatWest Group’s operations net zero by the end of this year. NatWest has also pledged to reduce or eliminate the business it does with oil, gas, and coal-related companies as part of a commitment to further the 2015 Paris Agreement on curbing global temperature increases.