After graduating from law school, Wallingford native Kathleen Murphy spent 15 years on the legal side of the corporate world.
She served in a variety of legal and government affairs positions with Aetna, and eventually acted as general counsel and chief compliance officer for Aetna Financial Services.
In 2000, after ING acquired Aetna, she served as general counsel and chief administrative officer of ING’s U.S. financial services operation. She became chief executive of ING’s wealth management unit in 2006.
Making the leap from corporate legal counsel to CEO was a career-changer.
“It was a big change, from a pure staff role to running a large business, which was a big deal,” she said. Career-wise, Murphy added, “It was somewhat instructive as to the risks you have to take.”
At the time, ING was a global company, and Murphy’s next move would have been to corporate headquarters in Amsterdam. But Murphy, who was living in Atlanta, wanted to return to New England.
She joined Fidelity in January 2009 as president of Personal Investing, a Fidelity Investments company that provides retail brokerage, mutual funds, managed accounts, annuities and other financial products.
‘Great Opportunity’
“Fidelity was a great opportunity,” she said.
Fidelity PI has more than $1 trillion client assets under administration, more than 13 million customer accounts and more than 9,500 employees.
Personally, she attributes much of her success to the support of her husband, George Hornyak, who put his accounting career on hold to stay home and help raise their son, Jack, 8.
Murphy tries to balance work and family life. When she was at ING, she traveled to Europe once a month. Now, she said, “I try to be smart about travel, and focus on the family on weekends.”
She mentors women at Fidelity, as well as at ING. Murphy is also active with the U.S. State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership, which connects talented, emerging women leaders from all over the world with Fortune 500 female CEOs for a month-long internship program.
