Concentration: Accounting

Current Role: Chief Financial Officer, Thrive

“I always loved numbers as a kid,” Carroll School alum Jay Adams ’87, P’17 told the Boston Business Journal in a profile recognizing Adams as 2021 CFO of the Year. Adams studied accounting at the Carroll School, in addition to playing varsity baseball for the Eagles. He is currently the chief financial officer at Thrive, a managed services provider where Adams has overseen nine acquisitions in five years.

Photo: Gary Higgins/Boston Business Journal

Undergraduate Concentration: Finance

Current Role: Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Socure

While a student at Boston College, Johnny Ayers ’08, M.S.F. ’09, made a name for himself as a two-sport varsity athlete, playing both football and baseball while earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in finance at the Carroll School. Now, during a period of global disruption that sparked widespread adoption of virtual business services, Ayers is attracting attention for his entrepreneurial savvy. Ayers is the founder and chief executive of Socure, an online security company that made Forbes’ 2021 “Fintech 50” list. The company’s artificial intelligence technology provides financial services companies with user verification and fraud prevention by analyzing emails, IP addresses, and device types. Socure raised $100 million at a $1.3 billion valuation earlier this year.

Photo: Socure

Current Role: Co-Founder & General Partner, Visible Hands VC

A new venture capital firm in Boston has a goal that the Boston Globe called “provocative”: to “manufacture privilege” for underrepresented tech entrepreneurs—specifically, women and founders of color. The firm is called Visible Hands, and one of its three co-founders is Yasmin Cruz Ferrine, M.B.A. ’18. Ferrine, who is Latinx, has a background in investment banking, having worked at John Hancock and Brown Advisory in Boston. She also served as Finance Director for a PAC supporting former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s 2020 presidential campaign.

Visible Hands offers early-stage startups a 14-week fellowship to get their project off the ground along with $25,000 in seed money. According to the Globe’s article, the founders behind the firm’s first 50 investments are indeed diverse: 49 percent are Black entrepreneurs, about 14 percent Latinx, about 14 percent Asian, about 10 percent multiracial, and about 12 percent white. Nearly three-quarters are women.

Photo: Visible Hands

Current Role: Managing Director and Founder, Guo Group at UBS

On Forbes’ latest list of the top 1,000 women wealth advisors in the country, Jessica Guo, M.B.A. ’97, ranked 40. Based in Wellesley, Mass., Guo is a Managing Director and founder of the Guo Group at UBS, which specializes in helping families to build substantial wealth across generations, both domestically and internationally. Working Mother magazine (in partnership with the same research firm used by Forbes) also included Guo on its list of Top Wealth Advisor Moms in late 2020. 

Photo: Forbes

Concentration: Accounting

Current Role: Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, M&T Bank Corporation

Several outlets, including Yahoo! Finance, have covered the merger of People’s United Bank and M&T Bank, the latter of which is led by René Jones ’86, P’25. Jones, who has worked at M&T since 2005, will continue to serve as Chairman and CEO of the combined company. Jones publicly committed to preserving 1,000 jobs during the merger, in response to media inquiries about M&T’s plans for the former hub of People's United Bank in Bridgeport, Conn. Jones is also a BC Trustee.

Photo: M&T Bank via Boston College Office of University Communications