About Mary Schapiro
Mary Lovelace Schapiro (born June 19, 1955) served as the 29th Chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). She was appointed by President Barack Obama, unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and assumed the Chairship on January 27, 2009. She is the first woman to be the permanent Chair of the SEC. In 2009, Forbes ranked her the 56th most powerful woman in the world. Schapiro served in various roles as a financial services regulator in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. From 2006 to early 2009, she was the chairman and CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the securities industry's self-regulatory organization for broker-dealers and exchanges in the United States. Schapiro is the first person to lead both the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the only one to have chaired those two agencies as well as FINRA. From 2015 to 2023, she led the secretariat of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. Schapiro currently serves as the vice-chair of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a group formed during COP26 climate conference in Glasgow and describes itself as "a global coalition of leading financial institutions committed to accelerating the decarbonization of the economy." In 2025, she was named to the TIME 100 Climate list and given the Alfred J. Rauschman Award by SIFMA. Senate unanimously confirmed Schapiro's appointment by President Barack Obama to be the SEC's first female permanent chair. In 2008, her last year at FINRA, Schapiro earned a regular compensation package of $3.3 million; on departure from FINRA, she received additional lump sum retirement benefit payments to a total of just under $9 million.
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