Women in finance: Christina Ma

As soon as Chinese premier Li Keqiang announced plans in April 2014 for a landmark scheme to link the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges, Christina Ma, head of Goldman Sachs’s China equities coverage, got to work. “We dropped everything else and made it our number one priority,” Ma said. “There was no question of us not being there on day one.”

Hundreds of people worked on Stock Connect but Ma was instrumental in the organisation, logistics, and discussions to turn the idea into reality, a project that took an enormous amount of time Ma estimates she and her team spent 30,000 man-hours on Stock Connect in the six months leading...