McKenna’s Gold: The woman who raised the standard for standards

When you have 40 years of experience in banking, you tend to get asked for advice. Karla McKenna’s advice is carpe diem—seize the day—and control your own destiny. “I always advise people that no matter how strong the institution or the opportunities, you’re in charge of your own career, and you need to manage it,” she says. “I changed roles five or six times at Citi—often by identifying something that the firm needed, then writing a brief and presenting it to my managers.”

Yet when it came to the topic she’s best known for—standards—McKenna fell into that initially reluctantly before turning it into an industry-leading role. And even that came about from seizing an opportunity to move firms and take on a job with a wider remit and more international outlook.

But when she first entered finance, McKenna hadn’t heard of standards. She demonstrated an interest in business and finance early on. Her parents ran a stationery store in Teaneck, NJ—the store is still there today—and she envisaged a career in business administration. In high school, she enrolled in an organization called Exploring, a career education program affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America, and focused on banking, quizzing any professionals she knew about finance, including the family accountant. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) in finance and economics from Georgetown University in Washington, DC—and later received an MBA in finance from NYU Stern School of Business, where she studied at night while working at Citigroup—but returned to the New York area to pursue a career in finance.

I would tell my colleagues on standards bodies that we were not just people sitting in a room debating the sequence of a code, but rather we were setting the enablers of economies, wealth, security of transactions, and transport of data—and that the work we do is not just the plumbing, but translates to real-world issues.

Karla McKenna

Most of her classmates became corporate bond analysts, but McKenna received an offer to join Manufacturers Hanover Trust’s corporate agency and trust business in 1981 as a trust officer, where she explained offerings, prospectuses and indenture documents, and reviewed and attended bond deal closings. In that role, she became familiar with a range of instruments and customer types, but craved exposure to a broader range of assets. An opening at Citigroup—where she would spend the next 35 years—afforded her that opportunity.

It was by working in Citi’s corporate agency and trust area that McKenna first became aware of standards—or rather, the lack of them, and how it hindered the firm’s ability to scale.

“I didn’t start thinking about standardization until I became involved in a project across departments to develop a platform for customers to automate transaction information sent to the bank, and I realized that there were external standards, yet within my department, I would see Telexes come in, and people tear off the sheet of paper and key the data manually into the system,” McKenna says.

But it was the industry-wide migration to the ISO 15022 payments messaging standard that was a turning point. Initially, McKenna didn’t want the project, but ended up in charge of it anyway. She took on the migration project in February 2001, and the bank migrated global operations to ISO 15022 in November 2001.

“That’s when I really started getting into standards. So while everybody else on that project went back to their regular jobs, I proposed creating a new position to evaluate and implement any new standards changes that we would have to make,” she says. “Every year, there are things you need to do—or standards won’t work. People responsible for that in other firms always had operational roles [that took priority]. I was the only one with this as a full-time job. And many institutions recognized that Citi was the only one at that time with someone fulfilling that role full time, so we turned it into a kind of leadership role, because you need people out there making sure standards are up to date, and it got to a point where we were represented on industry committees and organizations, and driving standards.”

In this role, McKenna became one of the most widely known and recognized individuals in the standards and reference data industry, also serving on standards bodies ISO and Isitc, and continuing to hold board roles with XBRL and Eurofiling. She became a proponent of the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and became head of standards for the Frankfurt-based Global LEI Foundation (Gleif) in 2015, while still at Citi.

When McKenna parted ways with Citi in late 2019 after more than 35 years, Gleif CEO Stephan Wolf invited her to join the organization as managing director of its Americas business.

“It was a natural transition to take on a full-time role where I could focus my time on the activities I was already doing at Gleif on a secondment basis,” such as new and different strategies to make the LEI more useful, she says. For example: applying LEIs to digital assets, and to identify organizations and people via digital certificates, working with financial institutions to begin using LEIs earlier in processes such as client onboarding and know-your-customer (KYC) initiatives, and educating regulators and public bodies about how LEIs could be useful to activities as diverse as the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current climate change consultation.

“I would tell my colleagues on standards bodies that we were not just people sitting in a room debating the sequence of a code, but rather we were setting the enablers of economies, wealth, security of transactions, and transport of data—and that the work we do is not just the plumbing, but translates to real-world issues,” McKenna says. “A lot of people have put their trust in me to drive that and ensure the standards machine was running.”

Looking back, she says the decision she made to move to Citi was pivotal because it led directly to the path of global market structure and standards that she would pursue for most of her career. “If I had stayed focused on the US market, those opportunities may not have arisen. For me, the best opportunity was to contribute to the industry and bring that experience back to make our own organization better,” she says.

Today she continues that philosophy in her work at Gleif.

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