For all the placating noises from UK finance industry chieftains, a truly diverse workforce in the sector may be years — if not decades — in the making.
Asset managers need to do more than just pay lip service to diversity because laggards risk downgrades by investment consultants and could lose out on strong returns generated by teams that better represent society, said Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst Sarah Jane Mahmud. “What we’ve got to do is go beyond the internships and do something to recruit black people and to progress their careers in the financial sector,” said Harry Matovu, a trial lawyer who created a Charter for Black Talent in Finance and the Professions that has not been signed by any investment bank so far. “Give them the aspiration that they can be the CEOs of these big banks, directors in these big banks.
Executives at HSBC Holdings, Barclays and Standard Chartered have acknowledged the need to boost the diversity of senior management. At HSBC, for instance, less than 1% of senior leaders in the UK are black. Sorrell and other programme founders came up with the idea earlier in 2020 in response to the fact that only about 15 out of the thousands of portfolio managers in London are black.
The European Leveraged Finance Association, whose members include Invesco and JPMorgan Asset Management, started a training academy to encourage asset managers to hire from more diverse backgrounds.