By Stephanie A. Smith, Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer, Fifth Third Bank
At Fifth Third Bank, inclusion and diversity in the workplace are essential to living our Core Values: serving our customers, delivering financial performance, and being recognized as a leader in building an engaging workplace, a strong supplier base and vibrant communities.
For the last five years, we have earned a 100% score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. In our first year of completing the Disability Equality Index, Fifth Third earned a score of 90 out of 100. For decades we have been a leader with Project SEARCH, a school-to-work transition program for young adults with disabilities. In 2017, we launched a program that recruits from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, deepening our relationships with these institutions and improving the opportunities for their best and brightest students.
We are proud of our efforts even as we recognize that there is still work to do to ensure our workforce represents and reflects the communities we serve.
Further, we are committed to transparency in sharing our ongoing progress.
In 2020, our nation faced a pandemic and renewed turmoil as a result of continued systemic racism. We knew that we needed to be part of the solution to both.
In response to COVID-19, we supported $5.4 billion loans to 40,000 small businesses and positively impacted 600,000 jobs through the Payment Protection Program. Our business bankers proactively called each of our business customers to help identify solutions to help them navigate the unprecedented events of 2020. Our employees have been tireless, working long hours and late nights to ensure our customers are being taken care of first.
In response to racism, our leaders—starting with our chairman and CEO, Greg Carmichael—committed themselves and the Bank to standing firm against racism and inequality, and to being part of the solution on our journey to healing.
While we know that we cannot undo the effects of 400 years of history overnight, we are dedicated to making impactful changes to drive equality and equity. Last summer, we created our Executive Diversity Leadership Council, which is comprised of a group of executives and senior leaders. The council’s main responsibility is to provide input, oversight and drive accountability for our enterprise-wide initiative: Accelerating Racial Equality, Equity and Inclusion that has a specific emphasis on Black employees, customers and communities. Through our African American Business Resource Group, we hosted a company-wide conversation about the inequality and bias that continue to plague our nation. We also created an inclusion toolkit with resources to further dialogue and reflection. It is available on our website for the public to download.
The leadership council also approved a $2.8 billion commitment that will provide $2.2 billion in lending, $500 million in investments, $60 million in financial accessibility and $40 million in philanthropy across our 11-state footprint. Part of the commitment includes a $100 million neighborhoods fund, which focuses on improving the social and environmental determinants in a community.
Additionally, we unveiled six bold goals that we expect to achieve by 2025 in support of inclusion and diversity within our workforce and for our diverse suppliers. Some of the goals are to develop leaders at each management level who are women and persons of color, to ensure that the diversity of the Bank’s workforce reflects the markets we serve and to increase the diversity in our supply chain by directing at least 10% of our spending to diverse suppliers.
We are committed to ensuring that every employee, customer and community feels valued, respected and included. To learn more about our inclusion and diversity efforts and our accelerating racial equality, equity and inclusion initiatives, please visit 53.com/racialequity.
