Maria Aspan

Maria Aspan is the financial correspondent for NPR. She reports on the world of finance broadly, and how it affects all of our lives.

She comes to NPR from Fortune magazine, where she was a senior features writer. Her coverage included systemic inequities across startups and public companies, executive compensation, the business of health care, sexual harassment on Wall Street, and billionaire philanthropy. She won numerous awards for her work, including SPJ's Sigma Delta Chi award for public service in magazine journalism and honors from SABEW, NIHCM, Deadline Club, and others. She was a co-chair of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit, and interviewed top CEOs and other newsmakers for the magazine and Fortune events.

She has been an editor and financial reporter for most of her career, having covered banking and the financial crisis for American Banker and Reuters. She then oversaw coverage of venture capital, fintech, and the startup financial ecosystem for Inc. magazine. She is the author of Startup Money Made Easy: The Inc. Guide to Every Financial Question About Starting, Running, and Growing Your Business (Harper Collins).

Her reporting on business and finance has taken her around the country and abroad; she traveled to Saudi Arabia to report on American companies doing business there, and returned to her hometown region of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, to report on the expanding cult business of Wawa.

She graduated from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and got her start in journalism as a Paris fashion assistant for the New York Times. She's based in New York City. [Copyright 2025 NPR]