KITTY CHEN
Senior Managing Director; Head of Retail & Business Banking
East West Bank
As the senior managing director and head of retail and business banking at East West Bank, Kity Chen is one of only a handful of senior female executives in a predominantly male-dominated industry. Throughout her 35 years in banking, Chen had to prove to herself and her colleagues that she had what it took to be at the top, and she did it through her commitment to innovation, resilience and customer-centricity.
During her 30-year tenure with East West Bank, Chen has been instrumental in facilitating the bank’s remarkable growth, with its asset size expanding over 30-fold to $70 billion during her tenure, making East West Bank the largest independent bank headquartered in Southern California. She oversees the largest team in the bank, with over one-third of all associates under her stewardship, and her commitment to inclusivity is evidenced by the fact that nearly 70% of the managerial staff within her division are women.
Chen has played a pivotal role in guiding the institution through significant milestones. When the pandemic shut down businesses and forever changed the economic landscape in March 2020, Chen led her team in developing a manual application process and individualized assistance for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Whereas many other banks’ online-only systems became overloaded with the onslaught of struggling businesses applying for loans (websites crashed and business owners hit bottlenecks), East West Bank issued nearly 13,000 loans totaling $2.7 billion, 60% of which came from Chen’s team.
