Markets Media spoke with Jinny Chang, Central Treasury Lead of Asia Treasure Team, Citadel, who won Excellence in Hedge Funds at the 2025 Women in Finance Asia Awards.

What does this award mean to you personally and professionally?

Receiving this award is a real honor and represents a significant milestone in my career after having spent six years at Citadel while raising two beautiful children. It reminds me of the support, collaborative environment and exceptional resources that had been made available to me by Citadel, my extraordinary colleagues and my family. I am thrilled and truly humbled to be recognized among so many outstanding women and men in our industry and take great pride in being one of this year’s award recipients.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in this role and how do you approach them?

The core of what I do is to ensure stability while enabling scalability. This is a big responsibility that sometimes can be challenging to balance in a fast-changing and continuously evolving macroeconomic and regulatory landscape. As our fund rapidly expands across diverse geographies and strategies, it is critical that our treasury infrastructure evolves in tandem. We tackle this challenge by developing robust frameworks that foster both efficiency and resiliency. Our team collaborates closely with cross-functional groups to identify potential risks early, streamline workflows, and adapt processes to the unique nuances of local markets. This proactive approach enables us to remain agile without sacrificing accuracy or control.

Beyond your professional responsibilities, what keeps you energized and balanced?

Parenthood has been a vital source of balance and inspiration for me in recent years. Since I became a parent, my prioritization skills and ability to focus have improved tremendously. The perspectives I have gained through the process of raising my children expanded my personal and professional world. I sometimes find myself taking entirely different approaches to hard problems or difficult situations and achieving much better results.

I also learned to enjoy and recharge from community engagement both through Citadel’s initiatives and my personal network. Whether it’s participating in mentorship programs or volunteering at my church, it has been extremely rewarding to be part of the community where my family and I live and work.

What are your goals for the Asia Treasury Team and your own career in the next few years? How do you hope to continue driving excellence in Hedge Fund Operations?

My goal is to continue to play a pivotal role in Citadel’s continued growth in the Asia-Pacific region. I enjoy participating in the various initiatives at Citadel that are designed to constantly enhance our operational efficiency and to ensure cross-team alignment. Over the next few years, I want to focus on deepening my expertise and broadening my regional knowledge and insights. I want to become a leader who can effectively support our firm’s regional growth in the long run.

Looking back, was there a defining moment or experience that shaped your approach to treasury and risk management?

My career development has been a natural and steady progression although auditing and treasury may not seem directly relevant to each other. I started in public accounting, specifically in auditing for hedge funds and private equities firms, which laid a strong foundation for me in financial integrity and regulatory compliance and enabled my transition to equity finance trading in prime brokerage. The experience and valuable insights I had acquired since the transition, especially my understanding of the dynamics and functions of the financial markets made me a good fit for the Asia Treasury team that Citadel was building out. Since I joined the team more than six years ago, I have had countless opportunities to put everything I know into work while continuing to learn through a role encompassing  risk management, equity finance and much more.

How is the company leveraging innovation to enhance efficiency and risk management in the treasury function?

Citadel’s culture of learning and relentless focus on innovation has helped our firm continue to improve and perform over the years. In treasury, we have been leveraging technology to build and implement new tools that can simulate various stress scenarios and help us manage capital and counterparty risk more effectively. This is just one of many examples of how innovations have been enhancing our efficiency and risk management during rapid growth and volatile markets. We continuously refine our workflows to reduce manual intervention and latency which enable faster decision-making and empower teams to focus more on strategic areas rather than repetitive tasks.