In February, when Daniel Gamba took over as president of Northern Trust Asset Management, he said the focus on diversity, equity and inclusion was “a big reason why I joined the company.”
“You can see the focus on DEI from every level of the organization,” said Gamba, who joined the $1.2 trillion asset management firm after 22 years at BlackRock.
It’s not unusual to see a financial services company take DEI seriously, but it is rare to see such an ingrained emphasis at a company the size of Northern Trust Asset Management. Much of the credit goes to the leadership team, including Gamba’s predecessor Shundrawn Thomas, who resigned a year ago after 18 years at the company.
Internal structures include a DEI dashboard that enables managers to track and assess hiring, retention and promotion metrics. There’s good news on that dashboard: The executive group is more than 50% ethnically- and gender-diverse.
In 2022, NTAM’s parent company, Northern Trust Corp., received a 100% score in the Disability Equality Index of Best Places to Work benchmarking measure of diversity and inclusion.
Well beyond the good public relations it provides, Gamba said a dedication to DEI “provides different views in the performance of the organization.”
“Performance in asset management is about bringing the best ideas, and the only way to outperform the markets is to bring different views,” he added. “You have to have different views to be able to connect to the fundamentals of the different companies we invest in. When you have a team that looks alike, they will normally miss market opportunities.”
—Jeff Benjamin