Carolina Jannicelli, Head of Community Impact at JPMorgan Chase, joins ChedHER to discuss the firm's annual ESG report and how the firm is tracking its commitment to racial equity.

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How JPMorgan Chase is Measuring Real-World Impact

Welcome back to check her brought to you by Jpmorgan Chase. Jpmorgan Chase recently released its 2021 E. S. G. Report providing updates on the firm's commitment to advancing a more sustainable and inclusive economy. Joining us to learn more about this report is Carolina johnny kelly, head of community impact at Jpmorgan Chase Carolina, glad to have you on this morning. Can you just talk a little bit about the firm's priorities and how a racial equity fits into them? Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be with you today. So our firm's G. P. Morgan Chase's E. S. G. Priorities fall into two key areas. one is advancing inclusive growth and the other is the transition to a low carbon economy. Racial equity actually fits into both of those areas, but primarily as we think about what needs to happen to advance truly inclusive growth. Jpmorgan Chase is not neutral when it comes to the existence of structural racism in financial services and banking and we're taking a strong stand and owning the role that we can play and have to play in helping reduce the racial wealth gap just to ground is on the problem. Fed numbers from 1919 from 2019 show that the average median household wealth of a black family is eight times lower than that of a white household and median wealth for a latino family is about five times lower. So the gap is large and growing. Additionally, when we think about home ownership, there's a 30% homeownership gap between black and white households. That is a wider gap today than when housing discrimination was legal back in the 60s. So this all points to an urgent need to address the racial wealth divide in our country. What are some of the specific ways that that Jpmorgan Chase is making a difference on racial equity? Well, the primary way that we're leaning in is through our $30 billion October of last year. That commitment is primarily focused in increasing our lending towards critical aspects of the wealth creation cycle for the average american family. So increasing lending towards access and preservation and construction to affordable housing, increasing lending towards access to home home loans for black and latino families, increasing and strengthening the growth of small businesses owned by black and latino entrepreneurs and increasing access to banking, access to banking is actually the beginning of this journey. A well managed checking account can open doors in this country and it is critical for us to make it easier for more residents of minority communities to have access to banking and the information they need to improve their financial situation. And we're doing this through a couple of different ways. One is, we are increasing our branch presence in low to moderate income areas. Were also being more proactive in how we outreach to the community to provide financial, health, education and resources Through the creation of three new job family which are focused on community outreach and building trust and relationships with the community. We have the role of community managers, community home lending advisers who are critical in helping first time homebuyers navigate an often complex and confusing home buying process and senior business consultants. These are individuals who are solely focused in working one on one with black and latino small business owners to help them address operational efficiency issues, improve their business development strategies and overall set them up for scale and growth. I'm glad you touched on community banking. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the impact that this can have on communities, especially underserved communities. Absolutely. Our community banking strategy is a critical part of, of our approach for us to truly understand the needs of the community and ensure that we're solving for the right things. We need to become members of that community. We need to become integrated into that community and more importantly, be in a position to listen to the needs and build trust. That is why over the past couple of years, we have created over 300 community branches across our branch footprint nationally. Those community branches are different than normal branches in that they have dedicated space, space for convening for us to be able to provide financial health education, provide the space for communities to do grassroots events, pop up shops for local business owners and just really ramp up our level of engagement and education and welcome members of the community into our branches so that they can begin that journey of feeling more financially informed and empowered. I have less than like 15 seconds here, but I want to ask really quickly, how are you measuring your impact and reporting it So you cannot grow and manage what you can't measure. We are incredibly focused on that being transparent about that. We've deployed 18 billion of our $30 billion dollar commitment and I'll end with one story of impact Brianna schoolteacher in Dallas. Three weeks ago, we helped her access $60,000 worth of grants that made it possible for home to buy for her to buy her first home. That is impact at the individual level and the family level. And our goal is to expand this to the community level. Such a great story that to kind of capitalize that impact Carolina johnny kelly, head of community impact at Jpmorgan Chase. Jpmorgan Chase is committed to providing the education and tools to advance financial equity for women everywhere to learn more, visit jpmorgan Chase dot com slash W O T MM