Growth Opportunity Ahead
Ask Juan Job about the honors and accolades his company, New York Life Insurance, has earned lately for its diversity programs—among Hispanic Business magazine's Diversity Elite 60 for five years running, and for 11 years running, among Latina Style's 50 best companies for Latinas to work for, to name a couple—and he'll trace them all back to a simple corporate philosophy.
"The overarching idea," explains Job, who heads New York Life's Hispanic marketing group, "is that the inside of our office should resemble the community it serves."
And to a great extent, it does. Of the roughly 12,000 agents New York Life employs, some 4,200, or 35 percent, come from a cultural minority background, according to Job. That includes about 1,300 Hispanic agents, representing 11 percent of the company's captive sales force. From supplier diversity programs to recruiting not only Hispanics but African-Americans, Asians and other minorities to its workforce, New York Life's commitment to diversity as a core corporate value is reinforced from the top down, Job says. "When our chairman [Ted Mathas] looks at our company, he likes to say, 'We're firmly entrenched in the international market, we're just deploying internationally here in the U.S.' "
Multicultural ideals "have become part of our mainstream, part of our reality," continues Job. "We firmly believe it is the right thing and the smart thing to do. It's a big part of long-term growth."
The high road to Growth
For New York Life and some of its counterparts in the financial and insurance segments, multicultural programs have become a cornerstone of 21st century business strategy. "There is a view that the life insurance industry is a mature industry," says Job, "but we take the contrarian view to that. We think there's tremendous opportunity for growth by serving the Hispanic community."
And, he adds, "The way to better serve that community is to recruit qualified individuals in the community, to bring them to New York Life, train them as financial professionals and put them back in the community."
Pointing to recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates that Hispanics will represent about one-third of the U.S. population by 2050, roughly double the percentage today, Fabian Gonzalez, vice president of multicultural sales at ING, asserts that the opportunity for insurers and financial services companies to serve the Hispanic market is "huge," and likewise, so is the opportunity for Hispanics in those lines of business. "Diversity markets are underserved," says Gonzalez. "Not having a strategy to take advantage of that is missing an opportunity."
One way ING is seeking to capitalize on that opportunity is by partnering with its independent distributors to diversify their sales forces, Gonzalez explains. ING is also leading by example. Of the roughly 10,000 people the company employs in the U.S., 18 percent are ethnically diverse. In 2011, ING was honored as Financial Services Diversity Corporation of the Year by a group of organizations headed by the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and including the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
"Diversity markets are underserved. Not having a strategy to take advantage of that is missing an opportunity." Fabian Gonzalez, ING
RECRUITING. When it comes to multicultural hiring practices, the financial services and insurance segments as a whole could take a cue from the likes of ING and New York Life. As of 2008, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), minorities held about 10 percent of senior-level management positions and 17 percent of all management positions in the U.S. financial services industry (banks as well as the securities and insurance sectors). About 3 percent of senior management positions were held by Hispanics, compared to 2.8 percent by African-Americans and 3.5 percent by Asians, according to the EEOC.
Citing EEOC data, the U.S. General Accounting Office concluded in 2010 that "overall diversity at the management level in the financial services industry did not change substantially from 1993 through 2008, and diversity in senior positions remains limited."
