New bank, credit union diversity leaders share their top ideas

May 31, 2022 11:07 AM

Credit unions and community banks are doubling down on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, both internally and as part of their communities.

Whether promoting internal talent or executing a search for new leaders, the boards of many community lenders are enlisting the help of cross-cultural experts to better situate themselves to meet the needs of the underserved and promote inclusiveness.

Two years since the murder of George Floyd, financial institutions have continued to introspectivly review practices and hiring efforts to ensure that DEI-focused campaigns are successful in creating a more inclusive workplace culture, offering opportunities for staff of all backgrounds to rise through the ranks. With the recent racially-motivated shooting in Buffalo, New York, the importance of inclusivity within banks and credit unions will remain at the forefront of decisions to come.

These three bank and credit union executives have stepped into new positions with the goal to nurture their organizations and determine the best strategies for progressing the principles of a diverse workforce:

Erin Komorowski

Head of M&T Bank's environmental, social and governance office

Prior to Erin Komorowski taking the position of head of the Buffalo, New York-based M&T Bank’s environmental, social and governance office this month, she worked with her mentor John D’Angelo to develop the division’s foundation.

“When we started exploring what ESG and sustainability means for the bank, and I was asked to start exploring that [topic], it was kind of a wonderful full circle for me in terms of my background,” serving with the Peace Corps and assisting with other nonprofits, Komorowski said. “Over the past year, we've worked through our reporting, our governance [and] number of partnerships, on initiatives across DEI as well as around some sustainable financing.”

She has worked with members of the bank’s board of directors to develop adequate governance programs for its ESG strategy and to provide them with education for what each component of ESG encompasses.

For the remainder of 2022 Komorowski will focus on building upon the feedback M&T gathered from stakeholders such as community members who called for transparency about the bank's progress with various DEI initiatives, such as increases in diverse hires and lending activity to more minority applicants. In doing so, she identified three core areas where the bank can make a greater impact.

The first category is analyzing how M&T approaches the process of deploying capital through lending.

“We've been focused over the last several years on how are we lending capital to women and minority owned businesses, [and] how are we helping them grow and thrive while creating equity in our economy in that regard … as well as our longstanding work with community reinvestment in terms of lending to individuals in our communities, and making sure that we're making affordable housing accessible,” Komorowski said.

M&T is focused on developing diverse internal talent and providing opportunities for employees to broaden their skill sets through training in areas such as data science.

Additionally, the bank is working to bring in talent — specifically underrepresented — from the communities it serves.

“As a financial services institution, when we can create new opportunities for our communities and our workforce, we're making ourselves stronger and we're also making our customers stronger, with better talent pipelines,” Komorowski said.

Komorowski emphasized that for financial institutions seeking to strengthen their commitment to the communities they serve, seeking diversity, striving for equity and prioritizing inclusion were essential tenets to help galvanize regions in the wake of tragedies.

“At a minimum, it is our joint responsibility as individuals and an organization to make the communities we're in safe for everyone and ideally, places that everyone can thrive … But

I feel like there has been a very clear outcry of how essential this is in and of itself, and not just within the corporate environment,” Komorowski said.

Emma Hayes

Chief culture officer for State Employees' Credit Union

Emma Hayes joined the $53 billion-asset State Employees’ Credit Union in Raleigh, North Carolina, as its first ever chief culture officer in March. But her work to become a certified expert in DEI-related matters began long before SECU.

“[After I was certified as a diversity professional in 2018] I came back and immediately implemented a DEI program at the $3.5 billion-asset Local Government Federal Credit Union … In that program, I worked with different levels of leadership and what I asked them to do was to work in cohorts to identify areas of opportunity for diversity, equity and inclusion,” Hayes said.

Through the breakout group sessions coached by Hayes as director of learning and development for the credit union, Hayes was able to launch projects tackling its policies and procedures, looking at how it built a pipeline of talent. She eventually founded a DEI committee to continue furthering the initiatives once the cohorts disbanded.

She then began a second leadership position as the chief diversity officer for the African American Credit Union Coalition in Duluth, Georgia, which was established in 1999 and advocates for the progression of Black professionals in the credit union industry.

“I spent quite a bit of time at the AACUC conducting training sessions for the membership, working as a consultant to help them launch their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, providing training sessions for leadership teams to help them figure out where they were on this journey and then developing a plan for moving forward,” Hayes said. “I was able to really hone my skills as a certified diversity professional working at AACUC because it gave me an opportunity to work with lots of different credit unions and leagues alike across the industry.”

Hayes has implemented a three-stage plan for 2022 to ease into the C-suite title and map out the credit union’s culture as a whole.

Since completing her initial settlement phase in April, Hayes is now in the second stage, familiarizing herself with the other operations and leaders of the credit union and expanding her division of experts to develop a more encompassing workplace culture.

“[At present] I’m having conversations with our staff members, meeting with our other members of our leadership team, meeting with members of the board and just really getting to know and immersing myself in the current culture of SECU … Building the team such that I have people that will help me develop our leadership language in our leadership program and help focus on the employee experience and help focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is another area that I'm working on currently,” Hayes said.

Once established, Hayes will begin drafting her vision for SECU and gathering data from employees through surveys and exit interviews to help generate a baseline for accurately measuring the credit union’s progress with its DEI goals and gauge its promotion and retention efforts.

As the credit union industry continues its quest for inclusion across fields of membership and all levels of employment, institutions like SECU can become a place of both financial and equitable inclusion, Hayes said.

“Our industry was built on seven — now eight — cooperative principles that stem around providing for and caring for those who are disadvantaged and underserved and those communities tend to be or have been people of color,” Hayes said. “I see our industry already on the forefront of the change that needs to happen in this nation.”

Helena Haynes-Carter

Chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer for KeyCorp

Helena Haynes-Carter joined the $180 billion-asset KeyCorp in Cleveland on Jan. 31 after most recently holding the role of senior director of global diversity, equity and inclusion for the health care and insurance firm UnitedHealth Group based in Minnetonka, Minnesota.

Throughout her work with organizations such as the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority in Denver, Xcel Energy in Minneapolis and the $578 billion-asset U.S. Bancorp in Minneapolis, Haynes-Carter was able to leverage her experience as an African American woman to help provide fresh insight for her peers.

“I would have the ability to sit at boardroom tables and provide a very different perspective [where] I may have been generally the only Black woman at the table,” Haynes-Carter said.

Upon stepping into her new position, Haynes-Carter worked with the bank’s chief executive Chris Gorman to evaluate its metrics and progress in DEI and to develop benchmarks.

One of the first projects that she worked on — and is still in the midst of leading — involves listening sessions between Haynes-Carter other women as well as African American, Hispanic, Latino, Asian employees who occupy positions at the beginning of the executive ranks to learn from their experiences and help sculpt a complete image of what diversity is like at the bank.

“We believe that if we're focused on that group, in addition to the broader programs, that we can unlock something that is differentiated and specific,” Haynes-Carter said.

Based on its initial discussions, KeyBank is building upon its prior relationship with the region’s economic development organization Greater Cleveland Partnership as it applies for a grant with the Department of Labor around upskilling talent and bringing in nontraditional workers.

In addition to the strides already made by the bank in the way of DEI, Haynes-Carter is prioritizing her work with members of her company's board of directors to continually reevaluate its benchmarks and determine how to best incorporate the recent progress into its strategy for growth.

“Part of the challenge of setting our own bar when we think about who we are as a bank, particularly during this time with the highest interest rates in three decades, [is] how do we really integrate diversity, equity and inclusion in the KeyBank growth strategy,” Haynes-Carter said.

For financial institutions seeking to utilize new perspectives that match those of customers, the principles of DEI have both an ethical and a financial reward.

“The case for DEI has been around since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and as we continue to talk about how do you really demonstrate best practices, we believe at KeyBank that diversity, equity and inclusion are business accelerators … It's part of our legacy, [and] it helps us do better at our business,” Haynes-Carter said. “It's beyond social and it's beyond compliance."