Brenda Ross Dulan is the executive vice president and region president for Wells Fargo in the state of New Jersey. As a teen, Dulan thought that she wanted to work as an actuary, but the Howard University alum didn’t expect that she’d work in banking. After attaining her MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, she decided to move away from insurance and into banking. And she hasn’t looked back.
“My primary responsibility is to run a region that includes about 150 banking stores with about 12 billion dollars in deposits,” she explains. “We have about 1,700 team members and serve about 1.3 million customers [in] everything from consumer checking accounts, business accounts, investments, insurance — a whole array of financial services in that particular region.”
In her role with Wells Fargo, Dulan has the pleasure of helping many individuals and businesses realize their financial dreams and attain goals that they’ve set for themselves. As such, she has never taken for granted how fortunate she is to be in a position to help others. When she was on the West Coast, she served on the boards of the Los Angeles Urban League, the Greater Los Angeles African American Chamber of Commerce, and the corporate advisory boards of FAME Renaissance and the Latin Business Association.
“I do live from a place of gratitude,” she says. “One thing my mom always taught me is that you don’t get where you are by yourself. So I’m very appreciative of the support that I get from people around me. But I’m also reminded of the responsibility to be disciplined and good at what I do; to make sure that I’m actually delivering so that I can open up the door for others that are around me.”
More than anything, Dulan takes pride in the fact that she can push other people forward. Her work with Wells Fargo’s banking customers is a constant reminder that she can make a world of difference in people’s lives.
“I think there is an opportunity to marry your professional aspirations with your personal mission, and that’s what I really try to do,” says Dulan. “[I want] to leave people better off than when I found them. And I am able to do that in the banking business through the people I touch, through the people I might manage, the people who are in the community and I get an opportunity to work with. There’s an opportunity to make your community better.”
