For someone who wanted to help change the world, Amy Nauiokas has risen surprisingly high in the financial sector. Jane Simms asks her about being a woman in a male business, seizing opportunities, that persistent social conscience and how 9/11 changed her life

Amy Nauiokas is in pensive mood. It is September 11, six years since her then employer Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 staff in the attacks on New York's World Trade Centre. Nauiokas survived because she overslept, and spent the next two years helping to rebuild the business and supporting the victims' families.

"This is always a day of reflection for me, when I think about where I am compared to where I thought I would be, how I am living my life and the purpose behind what I'm doing," she says. "It's a day for the heart, rather than the mind."

It is a combination of her heart and her mind that has fuelled Nauiokas's meteoric rise and, at just 34, she can't be disappointed at where she's got to, either professionally or personally. She left Cantor Fitzgerald in 2004 to join Barclays Group as head of electronic sales and trading, and is now managing director of Barclays Stockbrokers, the UK's largest retail broker, and sits on the management committee of Barclays Wealth. She lives in Kent with the artist James Connolly and their three-year-old son.

She's come a long way. After a BA in international studies from Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, and an MA in international business from Columbia University, Nauiokas spent her early career at Bankers Trust and Bear Stearns. Yet despite her success in the financial arena, her "true calling", as she puts it, is the not-for-profit sector.

While at Dickinson, she helped establish the college "study abroad" programme in Cameroon, where she also worked for the US Peace Corps (similar to the UK's VSO scheme). But she realised the not-for-profit arena wouldn't allow her to change things fast. "I wasn't going to be able to fix things at the age of 21," she says, "with no real skills or network, wandering the world with a backpack trying to figure out how to help people." So she went into the financial services field, because it would give her the skills to make a difference later. "I made a commitment to stay true to the values I held dear and to continue to be myself in an environment that didn't have many people like me in it," she recalls. "But it was also different from anything I had done, and I tend to put myself into uncomfortable situations, because that makes me stronger. It gets me to places I never thought I would get, and is more satisfying and fun."

Her drive and her values were inculcated in childhood. Though she was born in the US, her father was Lithuanian, her mother half-Italian. Theirs was a typical immigrant story of working hard and encouraging their children to take their education seriously. "My grandmother used to tell us we could be anything we wanted to be," recalls Nauiokas.

By 2001 she was head of global marketing, business development, investor and media relations at Cantor Fitzgerald, and was contemplating a switch to the not-for-profit arena, when the terrorists struck. "A week or two later, I realised I could make a real social impact from inside the organisation," she recalls.

She quickly found herself heading up human resources, too. "Over half my staff had died, so I needed to rebuild the team amid huge media attention," she says. "But it became obvious that we needed senior management oversight of recruitment to ensure we continued to hire the right people with the right skills and cultural fit, rather than just taking advantage of the generosity of people who offered to work for us for free, or hiring people just to fill the gaps."

She became immersed in setting up the victims' compensation fund, spearheading the memorial services and establishing the tribute website. She says it never really occurred to her or her colleagues to leave Cantor Fitzgerald. "In times of trauma and stress, people tend to go to the places they are most comfortable, and not going to work would have been very difficult for us post-9/11," she says. "At the beginning it was about getting back to work, helping rebuild the business, doing what we could to make it through day by day, and wondering why we were there. But it soon became clear that if we got this company back up and running, we could use it as a vehicle to help honour the colleagues we had lost and support their families. That adrenaline and momentum carried us through the first year and much of the second: there was a purpose to what we were trying to do."

Stephen Merkel, general counsel at Cantor Fitzgerald, remembers Nauiokas's "huge flexibility and diversity of capability" during that period. "She was a natural for the HR role," he says. "She has a good head for business and numbers, but a strong suit in people, too. It required strength and creativity to throw out all the old precedents and start again in new circumstances, but it didn't frighten her. She is forthright and persuasive and can both challenge and build consensus, whether managing up, down or sideways."

Nauiokas remembers that time as one of huge growth. She explains: "It made me more confident about making fast decisions without necessarily being able to build consensus, and being accountable for those decisions. It also increased my ability to embrace risk. On a more personal level, it taught me to think carefully about who I work around. I now handpick more, make closer bonds with colleagues and am more interested in their lives outside the office."

Her motivation, focus and optimism are as strong as ever—she has been a list-maker since she was a child—but she now tempers her eagerness to get to the next stage by stopping "to smell the roses".

Nauiokas left Cantor Fitzgerald before her son was born in 2004 because she felt the stress would prevent her being a good mother. She describes motherhood as her most important job and doesn't try to keep her home life out of the workplace. "I don't hide much of my personality at work. I'm direct, open and straightforward. It is much more pleasant being yourself."
Nevertheless, juggling home and work is not easy. "You do have to make sacrifices and priority calls, but you also have to remember that you have choices. No-one is forcing us to work in this environment, and if it just isn't working out, we can change it," she says.

But neither her child nor her gender have arrested her career, and she doesn't believe in glass ceilings. "Financial services is a tough field: the hours are long, the competition is fierce, the pace is quick and there are more men than women," she says. "I've always worked hard and smart and tried to stand out among the competition by doing things well. It's been a fantastic way to spend my professional life, because I have learned so much and built a great network of colleagues and friends in a short period."

She may be stopping more often to smell the roses, but Nauiokas doesn't let the grass grow under her feet. Colleagues say that since she joined Barclays Stockbrokers last year, she has infused the firm with energy and passion, given staff vision and a sense of purpose, and grown sales and profits accordingly.

"Her challenge was to make a market leader, which had grown a bit complacent, even better," says Rupert Dickinson, COO of Barclays Stockbrokers.

Focused on execution rather than strategy, she has brought in new people (some have worked with her in two or three previous jobs), reinvigorated existing people and introduced new products. "She's got an entrepreneurial spirit and is unfettered by history and bureaucracy," says Melissa Jenner, head of the brokerage proposition team.

Head of marketing Tom Ryan adds: "She trusts her gut, makes fast decisions and is not afraid to make mistakes. She is both empathetic and very demanding, and she gives people opportunities to grow and makes them believe they can do things."

Nauiokas has also used her expertise in marketing and technology—unusual commodities in financial services—to create market-leading products, including some that allow individual investors to actively manage their own portfolios.

"We are seeing a significant rise in 'self-directed investors'," she says, meaning people who are sufficiently interested in taking control of their financial portfolio to manage a portion of it on their own. She finds UK investors are much more accountable for their financial destinies than their US peers—a claim backed up by recent Barclays Wealth research which showed that 70 per cent of investors would like to manage at least part of their portfolio themselves.

UK investors are also increasingly sophisticated. "During the stockmarket volatility in August, our research showed that we had more buyers than sellers. They clearly saw the downturn as an opportunity rather than a threat, which is very different from the situation five years ago and is the result of better information and greater transparency," she says.

Despite continuing volatility in the markets, Nauiokas feels no sense of impending doom. "Most everything in the world is cyclical and goes through periods of heightened exuberance followed by a lull and then rebuilding. Whether in politics, financial markets, business, charities or as human beings, we are all wired to make similar mistakes over and over again. And the bottom line is that if something goes up, it is going to come down again."

Yet if that implies a certain futility, it isn't intentional. A firm believer in the need for purpose, Nauiokas is excited both by the growing desire of individuals to blend philanthropic activities into their careers, and the growing willingness of firms to accommodate their wishes.

She says: "Businesses have a responsibility to get involved in the communities they serve, and business leaders have to be responsible and accountable for making the world a better place, whether through their organisation, or personally. True leadership extends beyond the role you play in the organisation, and while people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are exemplary, we need more role models to show the world how collaboration and commitment between business and not-for-profit activities can create meaningful, sustainable change."

She is encouraged, she says, by the move towards enlightened capitalism, as discussed by Charles Handy in his book The New Philanthropists.
"It is a positive trend, so it doesn't really matter whether it stems from businesses thinking they have something to gain commercially, or business leaders admitting they have aspirations outside the boardroom. The trend will gain momentum because, increasingly, younger people want to work in different ways and are motivated by some sort of purpose rather than pure financial reward."

Nauiokas and her family continue to support the Dickinson College study-abroad programme through the Lois E Pallotolo Scholarship Fund, set up in memory of her grandmother. Nauiokas is also a member of the college board of trustees, is an adjunct professor in the business school at Columbia University, and sits on the advisory board of the Make-A-Wish Foundation in the US, which tries to make dreams come true for children with life-threatening illnesses.

But she is still on the lookout for the right full-time opportunity in the not-for-profit sector. "It will have to be sustainable and commercially viable," she says, "and as yet I have not seen that opportunity. But the social and capitalist worlds are working more in concert now. The right opportunity will come."

As someone who escaped death by oversleeping, Nauiokas might be expected to put a lot of faith in luck. But she believes you make your own luck. "I make very conscious decisions about what I am going to do personally and professionally," she says. "But I have always had an open mind and an optimistic attitude, which means opportunities arise that I might have missed if I were more rigid." As a role model for "self-directed living", she takes some beating.