20 for the Next 20: Raoul Magaña, First Hawaiian Bank

This retired Navy Reserve commander applies leadership lessons from the military to his role as senior VP and division manager of the Consumer Products Division.

Raoul Magaña
Senior VP and Division Manager of the Consumer Products Division, First Hawaiian Bank 

I had eight years with the nuns and then eight with the Jesuits,” Raoul Magaña says about his early education. “I was used to structure.”

An avid sailor and swimmer while growing up in Los Angeles, Magaña sought an adventure-packed, globe-trotting career. After earning a degree in foreign service from Georgetown University, Magaña joined the Navy, with deployments to the Western Pacific, Iraq and Afghanistan.

After completing his MBA at UH Mānoa, he served as deputy director of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Economics and Finance, before joining First Hawaiian Bank in 2014. In 2022, after 20 years of active and reserve service, he retired from the Navy Reserve as a commander.

“With his background in military leadership, over the course of his career here at the bank Raoul has learned to apply the same leadership concepts but in a much different corporate culture setting, to connect, to bring people along with him in his vision,” says Christopher Dods, COO and vice chairman of First Hawaiian Bank.

Dods says Magaña “comes from a disciplined place of making sure he’s doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons.”

Today, Magaña leads 130 people at First Hawaiian, where he is responsible for the bank’s consumer products including deposits, credit and debit cards, consumer lending and home equity lines of credit.

He and wife, Leah, have twin 9-year-olds, “a boy and girl, or as we say in my house, one and one and done,” says Magaña.

Keeping his finger on the pulse of global affairs, Magaña serves as board chair at the East-West Center Foundation. “For me, it maintains a point of connectivity to that bigger world and the engines that matter. The center is a place for convening and for furthering responsible approaches to governance, and to dealing with climate change,” he says.

Yet, he’s also very attuned to local market dynamics. “The general approach goes back to being an intelligence officer,” he explains. “You gather pieces of incomplete data and come up with sufficient information to be able to make an informed decision. For us it’s, ‘Will this work for the bank, the customers, and the staff ? Is it fair for all the people involved?’ We are guided by a lot of data analysis.”

He continues, “When I was a kid, my mom would always say that any level of mastery looks easy. The goal is to make it look easy.”