How Wall Street banks are deploying capital to address the racial wealth gap

It makes you think, what if the pandemic and George Floyd’s murder had never happened?

A year ago, many streets in U.S. cities saw an outpouring of people protesting for racial justice. Big business could not longer stay on the sidelines. (Photo: Karina Montoya G.)

“More needs to be done” or “now more than ever”. For the last 12 months, these phrases have been used by spokespeople in the banking sector to refer to a less cheerful reality — that they failed at addressing a problem they could have prevented from growing a long time ago: the racial wealth gap. An expression that, 15 years ago, we would have found relegated to academic research.

After the murder of George Floyd, and in the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wall Street banks started touting specific budget commitments to Black, Latino and other underbanked or underserved communities. The ones making more headlines have been JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.

But, more of what needs to be done? And how are corporate banking leaders touting this move any different from other social responsibility projects that end when no one is looking?

Because, looking at the chronology of these pledges, one thing is clear: most of them were only announced after the realization of a “reckoning on race”, in the words of Citi’s CFO Mark Mason (realization for who, right?), and well…