Sue Santos leans on core fundamentals like humility, self-awareness and collaboration to guide her career approach and leadership style. This allows Santos, a natural introvert, to stretch her comfort zone and prioritize colleagues and customer engagement to track performance, improve culture and meet stakeholder needs more fully.

Santos’s 30-year career began when she joined a bank credit training program. Attracted by the variety of learning opportunities the job offered, Santos progressed to relationship manager and came to appreciate relationship building and forming an understanding of a customer’s needs. She particularly enjoyed visiting small businesses that took pride in what they built and the people they employed as well as the candid feedback they were willing to offer.

During the early 1990s, Santos moved to GE Capital, where she spent the next 22 years of her career. The scope and diversity of her responsibilities at GE Capital led to many challenging and exciting opportunities, which expanded her expertise in risk, operations and process improvement. Santos spent time with multiple products at GE Capital, includIng cash flow lending, project and equipment lending and inventory finance, and she later focused on portfolio management, reporting and analytics. Her diverse experience helped her interpret trends and risks in portfolios and respond in a proactive manner. In addition, her efforts led to improved data availability and analysis.

After building such an impressive resume at GE Capital, Santos was well prepared when she became senior vice president and chief risk officer at Hitachi Capital America (now Mitsubishi HC Capital America) in 2016. Santos’ skills are integral to her work leading, implementing and maintaining a simplification and efficiency framework. As the company continues to grow, Santos promotes continuous improvement and enhanced capability maturity, including the introducing of enterprise and operational risk frameworks, processes and procedures into the business and championing a company-wide initiative for data-driven decisions.

“Sue is an effective communicator, and her sincere, authentic style brings credibility and fosters trust among the

working teams,” Kim Morse, vice president of operations in transportation finance at Mitsubishi HC Capital America, says. “She’s also a thoughtful listener and regularly solicits input while making key decisions. She is adept at bringing various groups together across departments and offices, building summit-style sessions to facilitate successful outcomes and share best practices. Sue is extremely well regarded among her staff and with her colleagues.”

Looking back on her career, Santos says being named MVP of GE Capital’s telecom financial services business is one of her proudest accomplishments. Santos says that while a large organization, GE Capital was still entrepreneurial enough for an underwriter to make a bigger difference in the growth and profitability of the company outside of their existing job responsibilities. Since learning such a lesson at GE Capital, Santos has sought team members who raise their hand to take the initiative to tackle new challenges and get tasks done. To grow and advance, her advice is to ask for more, learn more and become more important to your organization while expanding your resume and winning peer promoters.