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JPMORGAN Chase and Goldman Sachs are pushing back on demands to roll back their diversity initiatives.

In television appearances on Wednesday (Jan 22), the chief executive officers of the two New York-based firms said they are going to continue to focus on programmes to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in their workforces and customer bases even as shareholder activists push them to change course.

“Bring them on,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in a CNBC interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Dimon said that working to include marginalised groups in JPMorgan’s business is good for its bottom line and that he regularly receives praise for the bank’s DEI efforts from community leaders and local government officials across the country. “We are going to continue to reach out to the Black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBT community, the veterans community,” he said.

In the lead-up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, big companies including Walmart and Meta Platforms unveiled plans to roll back their DEI programmes. Walmart faced pressure from the anti-DEI activist Robby Starbucks, but the company said its changes were designed to “foster a sense of belonging, to open doors to opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers”.

While Starbucks has not publicly criticised the big banks, groups including the National Legal and Policy Center and the National Center for Public Policy Research, which own shares in the firms, have filed shareholder proposals urging the banks to remove links between diversity initiatives and executive pay, and examine DEI initiatives for legal and reputational risks.

“Our proposal is really about incentivising how executives are leading their companies,” said Paul Chesser, director of the National Legal and Policy Center’s (NLPC) Corporate Integrity Project. “The incentives should be fair.” The NLPC wants both banks to strip DEI considerations from executive pay.

JPMorgan is asking the Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to ignore the proposal, arguing that it contains false claims about the bank.

Goldman CEO David Solomon said in a separate CNBC interview that while he has not looked at the specific shareholder proposals, his company is attuned to what its clients are asking for.

“They think about decarbonisation, they think about climate transition. They think about their businesses, how they find talent, the diversity of the talent they find all over the world,” he said. “We continue to stay focused on talking to our clients and doing the things we have always done.”

The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) wants Goldman’s board to conduct an independent audit analysing the bank’s legal and reputational risks stemming from its race-based initiatives, and is asking JPMorgan to consider abolishing its DEI programme altogether. Ethan Peck, deputy director for the Free Enterprise Project at the NCPPR, said neither JPMorgan nor Goldman seem interested in reaching compromises to avoid the proposals going to a shareholder vote.

“They care very little about headlines and just do their thing,” Peck said. “It’s not like at a lot of other companies that are sensitive to news and what consumers would think and what investors would think.”

Even if the groups win the right to have their proposals included in the banks’ annual proxy statements, they face long odds of winning shareholder votes. Similar proposals from conservative groups in the past have rarely exceeded 2 per cent support, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Just a day after taking office, Trump took his assault against DEI policies to corporate America, targeting federal contractors and publicly traded companies for practices he labelled “dangerous, demeaning and immoral”. An executive order issued late Tuesday expanded the president’s directive on banning DEI policies beyond the government, urging all federal agencies to encourage corporations and other groups to end “illegal DEI discrimination and preferences”. BLOOMBERG