Visa’s home base in Northern California has been fertile ground for technology talent, but to bring people of more diverse backgrounds into key roles, the card network needed to look elsewhere.
San Francisco County, where Visa is headquartered, is 53% white, 36% Asian and 6% Black. Visa's U.S. workforce strikes a better balance between white and Asian employees overall, but the company's leadership roles are closer to San Francisco's demographics — 59% of leaders at Visa are white, 20% are Asian and 6% are Black.
Visa’s
To this end, Visa is making extensive changes to the way it recruits and trains employees. It’s hired a new diversity chief and the company is building an operations center in Atlanta, where 51% of residents are Black, 41% are white, 4.4% are Asian and 4.3% are Hispanic.
Atlanta is already a well-established source of tech talent. It is home to fintechs such as Kabbage, Bakkt and Greenlight; and one of the nation's largest card processors, Global Payments' Total System Services, has its headquarters 100 miles away in Columbus, Georgia.
Atlanta for years has been informally known as Transaction Alley because of its concentration of
“You could hypothesize that the high cost of living in New York City and San Francisco explains where the [payments] talent is, but when you look at the demographics of that talent, let’s face it — Black people, Latinx, Indigenous and mixed-race people aren’t represented much in those places,” said Michelle Gethers-Clark, Visa’s chief diversity officer and head of corporate responsibility.
By establishing a strong presence in Atlanta, Visa can make sure diverse candidates are not only hired but provided a path to advance into leadership roles.
“It isn’t just about changing hiring practices, core competencies, training and development and career-mapping; it’s taking a fully holistic view of our entire ecosystem and how we lift people up, and respect and honor the unique identities of our whole workforce,” Gethers-Clark said.
What Gethers-Clark hopes to achieve at Visa begins with early-stage planning, by working with local schools and making sure pathways exist for students to acquire necessary skills and mentorships to advance beyond entry-level positions to become managers and leaders at Visa, she said.
Visa already has partnered with Georgia Fintech Academy and other local colleges and universities to drive student engagement through mentorship and early career recruiting, and the company will deepen its connections to these and other organizations to build a ramp to Visa, according to Gethers-Clark.
“Even before we do things internally at any corporation, we need to make sure the communities we’re in have the resources they need, like education, and that they’re equitably distributed,” she said.
Before joining Visa six months ago, Gethers-Clark was president and CEO of United Way of Greensboro, North Carolina, where she
Previously Gethers-Clark was an organizational consultant, and before that she worked for 22 years as an executive at American Express, where she held a variety of roles. She ended her stint there as senior vice president and general manager, card operations with experience overseeing call centers and customer service.
Investors are pushing financial companies to improve their racial and gender diversity.
But change is coming from within as well, Gethers-Clark said.
“I think there was an awakening of social consciousness that happened with the murder of George Floyd in the middle of a pandemic that made us see some points of inequity that have always existed," she said. "And many people don’t ever want that to happen again.”
In addition to Visa’s corporate headquarters in San Francisco, the card network has facilities with at least 500 employees in Austin, Texas; Ashburn, Virginia; Denver; and Miami.
The 123,000-square-foot Visa center in Atlanta opens next year and it will eventually become one of the largest U.S. Visa offices once it’s fully staffed, according to the card network.
Atlanta fits into Visa’s vision for accelerating development of a more diverse workforce because of its overall livability, according to Gethers-Clark.
“There’s a very diverse population in Atlanta that’s mobile, with excellent transportation and access and the vibe is very urban,” she said.
A global expert in corporate diversity and inclusion applauded Visa's expansion to Atlanta, but said geography is only part of the picture.
"To make this move work to promote diversity inside of Visa will require sustained attention to patterns of hiring and corporate climate," said Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, director of the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "It is not enough to hire employees of diverse ethnicities in entry-level jobs, but they must be able to hire and retain at all levels to make a lasting change at Visa and in the community."
Gethers-Clark emphasized that Visa's plan goes well beyond the hiring stage.
“As a society we’ve told people for generations: 'You’re not right for this job’ or ‘Your gender isn’t good at this,’ " she said. "But this is now a knowledge economy and everyone should have the opportunity to advance.”
