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Top women at Pathfinder Bank, from left: Paloma Sarkar, First vice president, enterprise risk manager; Regina Bass, First vice president, corporate controller; and Cassandra Gehrig, First vice president for marketing.

Paloma Sarkar, First vice president, enterprise risk manager, Pathfinder Bank

By Mary Beth Roach

“Pressure is a privilege.”

This quote, from tennis great Billie Jean King, is one that Paloma Sarkar, first vice president, enterprise risk manager at Pathfinder Bank, uses in describing her role as a woman in the banking industry.

She sees it as a responsibility and a privilege to act as a role model and bring other women into the field and she is committed to expanding opportunities, since she said that young women in her native India were not often presented with these chances.

She would like to see more women in leadership positions. With the general population being nearly evenly split between men and women, Sarkar said she’d like those percentages better reflected in women in leadership roles.

Sarkar shared a 2018 article from the International Monetary Fund that outlined findings from a 2016 survey.

The results showed that banks with higher shares of women board members had higher capital buffers, a lower proportion of nonperforming loans and greater resistance to stress.

IMF explained that a higher share of women on bank and supervisory boards may contribute to financial stability because they may be better risk managers; more women on boards leads to diversity of thought; that discriminatory hiring practices may mean that the few women who make it to the top are better qualified or more experienced than their male counterparts; and that those institutions that attract and select women in top positions may be better-managed in the first place.

Sarkar’s own journey to her current position has been a combination of hard work and opportunities that she saw or created for herself.

She came to the U.S. in 2010, having earned her bachelor’s degree in technology-computer engineering in India in 2007. While still in India, she was working on coding on the finance module for a company and this sparked her interest in the field of finance. She then decided to continue her education in the United States and went to SUNY Oswego, where she earned a master’s in business administration with a concentration in finance. One of her professors was Tom Schneider, who was also president of Pathfinder at the time. She inquired about internships with the bank and started at Pathfinder as an intern in 2011. She became a full-time employee in 2011 and since then, she has served as a loan operations analyst and then worked in the credit and risk divisions of the bank. In 2020, she was appointed to her current position.

“I feel privileged that I can help other women,” she said.  “About 60 or 70 years back, women couldn’t even open bank accounts. And the fact that we are able to sit here, and discuss this, I consider this both a responsibility and a privilege. It is a time of exciting change and I am glad that I get to live in this time. It is our time.”