(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. said it plans to hire 300 additional Black and Latinx wealth advisers by 2025 to serve more clients from those communities and allow employees from diverse backgrounds to advance in their careers.
“We want to drive a step change in the representation of financial advisers” at JPMorgan, Kristin Lemkau, chief executive officer of the bank's wealth-management unit, said in a statement Friday. “We have made progress in recent years, and hiring 300 Black and Latinx advisers will accelerate that progress materially.”
Large U.S. banks have been pressured to help remedy race-based economic gaps the industry helped create. JPMorgan, the country's biggest bank, said in October that it committed $30 billion, including some existing spending, to help advance racial equity, including a pledge to underwrite home loans for Black and Latinx borrowers and changes to how its own executives' progress on diversity is evaluated.
Read more: JPMorgan Pledges Billions in Spending to Fix Racial Wealth Gap
Over the next five years, JPMorgan will partner with various historically black colleges and universities to offer students resources and information about careers in wealth management, and provide scholarships, training and licenses, the bank said Friday. The initiative will create 185 full-time positions specifically for the program by 2025.
Only 34% of Black families have retirement accounts, compared with 60% of their White counterparts, and their median retirement balance is $46,100, versus $151,000 for White families, JPMorgan said, citing Federal Reserve data. “There is a huge segment of the population that is not participating in investing” partly because the industry “has not been able to earn the trust,” Jeanne Sun, general manager of inclusive investing, said in the statement.
Read more: Citi Hires Goldman's Erika Irish Brown to Lead Diversity Efforts
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