The first woman to hold the position.. Hafiza Erkan, Governor of the Central Bank of Turkey

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday appointed a young former Wall Street financial officer, Hafeza Ghaya Erkan, as governor of the Central Bank, in a sign of a possible shift in his unconventional anti-inflationary policies.

Thus, the former CEO of the “Greystone” real estate finance company, the former co-CEO of the First Republic Bank (First Republic Bank) and the General Manager of Goldman Sachs, the first woman to hold the position of governor of the Central Bank in the history of the Republic.

Erkan, whose appointment was published in the Official Gazette on Friday, takes over the position to succeed Shihab Qawuji Oglu, who cut interest rates despite central banks around the world doing the opposite to counter inflation.

The young woman, Hafeza Ghaya Arkan, is known as the “amazing Turkish girl” in the United States, because of her educational and professional career, and she was the youngest professor of finance.

Hafiza Gay Erkan was born in 1982, graduated from Istanbul High School with the second rank, and joined the Department of Industrial Engineering at the prestigious Boğazıci University in Istanbul, and after obtaining an honors degree, she moved to the United States after being accepted at Princeton University.

Arkan earned her Ph.D. in Financial Engineering and Applied Mathematics at Princeton University in just one year.

She was awarded the title of “Youngest Professor of Finance” in the United States, and completed two other education programs in management and leadership sciences at Harvard Business School and Stanford University.

Hafiza Ghaya Arkan, known as the “Amazing Turkish Girl” in the United States, began her career at Goldman Sachs in 2005, which is one of the most famous banking institutions in the United States and the world.

After nine years at Goldman Sachs, she moved to work as a director at the First Republic, and assumed the position of senior vice president in 2014, as well as the head of the bank’s investment division and co-head of risk management.

And she had an instrumental role in the growth of the bank’s funds tenfold. When she took office, the bank’s assets ranged between 25 and 30 billion dollars, but by December 2021, the assets approached 250 billion dollars.

Ghaya Arkan became Co-CEO of the bank, and after seven months in her position, she decided to leave in December 2021.