Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Wall Street Lands On Honky-Tonk Highway

Wall Street Lands On Honky-Tonk Highway

AllianceBernstein Officially Opens Nashville HQ

by Joel Stinnett, Reporter, Nashville Business Journal

AllianceBernstein’s journey to its new home culminated in May with the grand opening of its Nashville headquarters. To mark the event, Joel Stinnett with the Nashville Business Journal sat down with Seth Bernstein and ChiefOperating Officer Kate Burke. Their Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. To read the article in its entirety, visit https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2022/05/05/abopens-nashville-hq.html

AB has made diversity an important focus of the company, and there is really no place in the United States more diverse than New York City. How have you been able to keep that diversity while moving to Nashville?

Bernstein: Demographically, if you put aside the Asian population in New York, it’s not that different. The African-American population, I think, was more or less the same. Part of diversity isn’t just ethnicity [or representation] from underrepresented minorities, but it’s also different points of view. We need those different points of view to have a more spirited debate. You need those different points of view to really understand holistically a challenge or an opportunity. Kate and the teams that really drove this transition went out of their way to reach out to pretty much every walk of life you could imagine, every house of worship, every community, every lifestyle, in order to understand how our people would adjust, accommodate and feel welcome. And I think [Nashville has] at least met our expectations in that respect.

After the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests, Seth wrote a letter to employees outlining some organizational changes that AB intended to make. You promised to appoint a Black board member, which you did, as well as to make changes to your investment platform alignment and corporate impact. How have those initiatives progressed?

Bernstein: The timing, tragic though it was, was helpful for us because we were embarking on much broader responsible investing and corporate behavior. We think about it, particularly ESG [environmental, social and governance] concerns, quite differently than a lot of people in our industry. We’re not interested in exclusions. We buy energy or oil and gas companies. We just want to understand what the implications are. What are the negative externalities to a shareholder in owning that company? And can we help that company become less carbon-intensive, or whatever the particular goal is, through our own activism and engagements with them, and we’re very comfortable being that. We just released our 2021 Global Sustainability Report, which [shows] how we measure our managers, how we evaluate companies and the securities we purchase, how we govern ourselves, how we have embarked upon measuring our own impacts. Are we making progress in making this a more diverse, inclusive workplace? We want to be as a transparent as we can in doing that. It’s a long journey, and we’re not going to get there tomorrow, because hiring today is very challenging.

Burke: On the ESG front, we do also recognize there are clients who are looking to have investment options that have more [purposeful] orientation to it. We have embarked on purpose-driven investment strategies that have been rolled out to our clients and have been very successful.