Witad Awards 2019 Write-Ups: Best Company for Diversity and Inclusion (end-user)—BNP Paribas

For BNP Paribas, it’s not a matter of whether it will achieve its diversity goals—it’s a matter of when. “We recognized diversity and inclusion as being core to our success quite a few years ago,” explains Vinay Kapoor, head of diversity and inclusion, Americas, for the French bank, adding that BNP Paribas “identified it as one of our 30 key operational risks.”

Working toward equality is daunting and Kapoor admits that progress is slow. “These organizations [within financial services] have been around for many years and what we’re challenging is a structural bias,” he says, although he sees evidence of a mindset change across the industry. 

Kapoor says prior to the global financial crisis in 2008, diversity issues “were not considered to be work-related” and not tied to success in the financial services industry, although that attitude has now changed. “We’ve seen some of the biggest failures in banking, in the whole sector, happened as a direct result of groupthink,” he says, describing the financial crisis as “one of the key motivating factors” in recognizing that diversity is necessary to avoid future disasters. “We need to avoid groupthink at all costs, because that actually cost billions and billions to the industry.”

BNP Paribas has the numbers to back up its progress: In the latest round of promotions announced in early March this year, 40% of the bank’s new managing directors are women. In 2016, BNP Paribas achieved its goal of 30% of its top 2,000 managers to be women, and Kapoor says that it is now working on more aggressive targets to reach that percentage for the firm’s top 500 managers. “We bake gender diversity into our promotions, retention and development processes,” he says, highlighting sponsorship, role models and education as essential to the firm’s strategy. “Sponsorship is absolutely key to bringing up emerging talent. Sponsors take an active involvement in a protégée’s career, as opposed to mentoring, which can be just giving advice. Sponsorship is taking an active role,” Kapoor says, adding that the bank is rolling out a sponsorship program targeting black employees. 

BNP Paribas’ educational efforts take advantage of local talent. In New York, for example, the firm now offers unconscious bias training, with Broadway actors role-playing real-life situations demonstrating what it is like to be a member of a minority group on a staff. 

Kapoor says when it comes to diversity, the tone “comes from the top of the organization,” noting that Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, CEO of BNP Paribas, is HeForShe Thematic Champion. HeForShe is the United Nations entity for gender equality and the empowerment of women.