- Jamie Dimon reaffirmed JPMorgan’s DEI commitments after pressure from an activist shareholder.
- One group wants JPMorgan to revisit how compensation is tied to the company’s racial equity goal.
- Trump’s executive order on Monday ended DEI programs in the federal government.
Jamie Dimon is doubling down on JPMorgan’s diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments amid pressure from an activist shareholder.
In an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the JPMorgan CEO said the bank continues to push ahead with its work in DEI work and environmental, social, and governance policies.
“Bring them on,” Dimon said about activist efforts.”We are going to continue to reach out to the Black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBT community, the veterans community.”
Dimon is known for working on both sides of the political aisle. In 2020, JPMorgan announced a $30 billion program aimed at working on racial equity in personal finance, a move that came as other financial institutions made significant commitments to similar causes. JPMorgan’s program included mortgage refinancing and working with Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Dimon’s comments at Davos come as the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative nonprofit, proposed this month that JPMorgan revisit how executive compensation is tied to the company’s racial equity goal.
JPMorgan started an “accountability framework” in 2020 to assess executives’ progress toward DEI goals, which affects compensation. The firm doesn’t publicly break out what proportion of executive pay, including for Dimon, is tied to DEI work.
JPMorgan and the NLPC did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
The NLPC has sent shareholder proposals focused on climate, China, and other issues to major companies in recent years.
In a different interview with CNBC on Wednesday, David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, said he had seen news of shareholder proposals, but that he has not yet looked at any of them.
“We’re advising our clients to think about these things,” Solomon said. “They think about decarbonization, they think about climate transition. They think about their businesses, how they find talent, the diversity of the talent they find all over the world.”
Goldman Sachs did not immediately respond to BI’s request for comment.
Shareholder proposals — about any subject — do not always end up on companies’ ballots. Proposals against ESG, including those against DEI, that came to a vote garnered little support in the last four years, per a review by shareholder advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services.
“These politicized campaigns have failed to make the case for the economic impact related to the requests,” wrote Subodh Mishra, ISS’s head of communications, in November.
On Monday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending DEI programs in the federal government and an order ending DEI-based hiring in the Federal Aviation Administration.
In recent months, several high-profile companies have rolled back their DEI programs, including Meta, McDonald’s, Ford, and Walmart — the nation’s largest private employer.
