Sarah Hammer
Managing Director, Charles Schwab
Sarah Hammer is Managing Director, Head of Trading, Digital Assets, and Artificial Intelligence Compliance at Charles Schwab. She is a senior executive in financial services, technology, and regulation with over 25 years of global leadership spanning government, academia, and multi-trillion-dollar financial institutions.
Sarah is Co-Chair of the International Expert Consortium on AI. She is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and was unanimously confirmed to the American Inns of Court. She has also served as an advisor to the World Economic Forum, the Dubai International Finance Centre, and the MENA Fintech Network.
Sarah was previously Executive Director at the Wharton School and Chair of Wharton Future of Finance, architecting and driving strategic financial sector initiatives. She was also CEO of Wharton Cypher Accelerator, leading all aspects of scaling pre-seed to late-stage AI, blockchain, and quantum computing companies.
She was also Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Academic Director of Penn Law Programs on AI and Digital Assets, and Affiliated Scholar at the Penn Program on Regulation.
Sarah was also Managing Director of the Center for Innovation in Finance and Senior Director of the Alternative Investments Program at Wharton. She quarterbacked Penn’s first digital asset, unique 3D IP memorializing Nobel Prize-winning scientific invention. She also led development of AI models to evaluate banking liquidity and lending risk.
Sarah was Acting Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities and successfully led the agency through the 2023 banking crisis. The Department regulates and supervises ~290,000 bank and non-bank financial entities, totaling $3.5 trillion in AUM.
Sarah was Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions at the U.S. Treasury, where she led the Office of Financial Institutions, the Federal Insurance Office (including the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program), and the Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Compliance Policy (cybersecurity).
Sarah served on the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC) board and was principal staff to the Treasury Secretary for the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). She also served five years on the board of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the specialized global agency for ICT and infrastructure.
Sarah has held leadership positions throughout financial services in general management, portfolio management, trading, marketing, research, and analytics at the Vanguard Group, PIMCO, JP Morgan Chase, BlackRock, and Tudor Investments.
Sarah earned a JD from UPenn Law, an MBA from Wharton, and a Master of Studies from Oxford University.
