Series Fifteen, Episode Seven: Being and Belonging: Financial services and safety for the LGBTQ+ community

Julia: Hello, my name is Julia Streets and welcome to DiverCity Podcast talking about equity, inclusion, and diversity in financial services.

On the podcast, we seek to shine a light on positive progress, call out areas requiring further focus and offer lots of ideas to help drive change. Before we get started today, I just want to take a moment to thank our friends at City A.M. who have given DiverCity Podcast a new home atImpact A.M. Their page is dedicated to ESG, impact investment, DE&I and more. Now, we really appreciate that they publish and promote both our episodes and our supporting blog series, so that their readers can say right on the very top of what’s important in the diversity, equity, and inclusion debate. So, thank you.

I am so looking forward to this discussion today because I’m joined by two guests, Billie Simmons and Geff Parsons. Allow me to introduce them to you, Billie Simmons (she/her) is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Daylight, the first only digital banking platform in the U.S. specifically designed for and by the LGBTQ+ community. Previously she founded a startup to help trans and non-binary people access safe services. Her background is in marketing and software engineering at Fintech-focused companies such as Techstars and Anthemis Group. She regularly speaks on LGBTQ+ initiatives in both mental health and technology. Billie, it’s great to have you on the show. How are you?

Billie: I’m very well, thank you.

Julia: So looking forward to the discussion today. Introducing our second guest is Geffrye (Geff) Parsons (he/him). Geff is the founder and the CEO or the Chief Empathy Officer of the Inclusion Imperative, a best-practice, diversity, equity, Inclusion and belonging consultancy. It helps commercial organisations and their leaders and staff harness the power of inclusion as a key strategy for wellbeing, organisational learning, and superior business outcomes. Athough his particular expertise lies in LGBTQ+ inclusion, he focuses heavily on the intersectionality with other marginalised characteristics to promote a holistic approach to inclusion. Geff, a very warm welcome to the show.

Geffrye: Thank you, Julia. Delighted to be here.

Julia: I’m always curious when we have great guests on the show, I’m dying to know what you are both up to. Billie, can I come to you first?

Billie: I’m currently in Mexico City. I have been spending the week with my Co-Founder and we have been figuring out what the rest of the year looks like for Daylight and for our new product focused on family building Daylight Grow.

Julia: Wonderful. And we’re going to get into some of the characteristics of Daylight for sure, but also the key things that you are thinking about in that strategy, no doubt. Geff, same question to you. What are you focused on?

Geffrye: The widespread pushback against LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion that we’re seeing all around the world. There was a time not so long ago when we could  self-righteously point a few other countries where we said, “Well, it’s illegal to be gay in 60, 70 odd countries.” But with the raft of anti-trans legislation in U.S. and all the issues around the Gender Reform Bill in Scotland, these things are closer to home now.  The world is becoming a bit more of a toxic place. And I’m focused very much on trying to work with organisations to try to push back against that, use them as a positive influence.

Julia: We’ve talked a lot on the podcast, particularly in the concerns of LGBTQ+ discussions, about the corporate importance and imperatives that organisations take on their shoulders to protect the rights of their employees around the world. Very curious to get into some thoughts about that. Geff, I wonder if I could stay with you. The first thought is, I mentioned in the biography about your approach to inclusion by fostering and focusing on this concept of intersectionality. I wonder if I could return to that and just get your thoughts about why that matters particularly and why it’s so important, through your opinion, on focusing it in that way.

Geffrye: We are all individuals and we’re all made up of multiple characteristics and we are not automatons, we’re not cookie cutters. It doesn’t make sense to try to see people in ways that don’t reflect the reality of organic creatures. Sitting here, I am an amalgam of different characteristics. As are you, as are everybody. If we don’t take into account all of the issues that people face, we’re not actually doing anything. I always use the analogy of a water balloon. You can squeeze a water balloon and sort out the bulging one bit. It just appears in another place.

If you’re not addressing all of the issues that people face, the compounding barriers to inclusion that people who have more than one marginal characteristic often face, then you’re not really achieving anything. There’s very little point in trying as an organisation, for example, to be LGBTQ+ inclusive if you are still racist or sexist or misogynistic. All that’s doing is basically moving the problem. Now, this isn’t new, of course. I mean Kimberlé Crenshaw became famous for coining the phrase about intersectionality over 30 years ago and it certainly predates even that. But it’s a recognition since then that we have to take a holistic approach to inclusion, otherwise you’re really not achieving the end result that you want.

Julia:  Billie, I’d love to bring you in here for your thoughts on this as well. And I’m sure this must be things that you are thinking about when you’re designing Daylight Bank.

Billie: Absolutely. I mean, one of the simultaneous joys and difficulties when building for the LGBT community is that the LGBT community sits across all intersections in the world. If you are white, you are probably not identifying as Black. The other dentity areas have moresilos, whereas if you are LGBT, you could be Black, you can be disabled, you could be a woman. And so to Geff’s point, in order to build and to serve the LGBT community, you need to understand and build for all of the intersections that exist, which in America is a huge amount of intersections. It has been a very challenging process, to be totally candid, but in a way that is solving a very difficult problem, and the joy that you get out of solving a very difficult problem. I feel very blessed that my job is figuring out those problems.

Julia: Billie, I’m really curious, could it give us a few examples of that challenge and how that bears out?

Billie: Absolutely. From a data point of view, you can’t talk about LGBT wealth disparity without talking about race in America, in particular. The Black community in particular has been affected by slavery and segregation and racism and policy changes and just frequent discrimination nowadays to accessing capital. So, if you are a Black LGBT person, both aspects of your identity are affecting your access to wealth, to income, to stability. And so when we’re looking at the macro, you are grappling with all of these different layered levels of discrimination that affect things like your finances.

 A really specific example that I often think about and is frankly not a problem that we’ve really solved yet is racism. It sounds like “I haven’t solved racism yet at Daylight”, but you understand what I’m trying to say. But one of our core features is the ability to have your chosen name on your card, so doesn’t have to match your legal ID. You can just put whatever name you identify as, or you use, on your card. We received feedback pretty early on that, particularly again for the Black community, but in general, people of colour are often challenged at point of sale when they use a debit card or a credit card of any kind and are asked for ID that matches that card that they’re using. So, if we’re issuing cards that can’t match your ID, of course that’s the problem that we’re solving, then we are potentially creating a problem for a part of our community down the line. The closest we could get to solving that was to put a phone number on the back of the card where we would validate that we have a legal name on file for these cards so we can validate that the person who’s holding the ID is the owner of the card. But it’s a great example of how I’m very entrenched in the LGBT community and in solving problems that I myself have faced, but when it comes to other intersections, it’s really important to be in constant dialogue with other parts of the community to hear about their experiences and the blind spots that you might have.

Julia: Can we explore it from the other point of view if you like, which is this question of how then financial services could play a part in creating a sense of belonging with the community, as well. Is there anything you’re particularly focused on with that?

Billie: Even just from the very basic point of view of showing acceptance at the larger financial institution level does go some way in allowing consumers to feel like they’re being listened to and accepted by their banks. I think that really one of the impetuses for Daylight is that it often doesn’t go far enough for the community. And often, we’re savvy people, we can tell when someone is just putting a rainbow flag on their social media icon for the month of June because it’s financially beneficial for them, not because they have a genuine desire to include the community. And so, we use our leverage, our position in the industry to really encourage other financial institutions to be making meaningful change towards inclusion. A great example of that was about a year ago now, we had our campaign called Call Me by My Name, which was asking other financial institutions to take on the standards for chosen name that we ourselves have taken on and we offered free consulting to any bank that wanted to learn how to build this system.

It’s actually a shockingly simple system, if I’m being totally honest. It’s really not that complex, but no one’s ever thought to build it and no bank took us up on it because there were a couple of smaller regional banks that were kind of vaguely interested. But the reality is that a lot of the systems that financial services institutions have are very complex and are very rigid and brittle towards change. And so there’s a lot of goodwill, but I remain sceptical about large financial institution’s ability to create meaningful change in inclusion for our community.

Julia:  Geff, I’d love to get your thoughts on this as well. Is this your area, financial services and belonging?

Geffrye: My background is financial services. I’ve worked in financial services for 35 years before becoming a consultant in D&I and that was always working in front office. So very much seeing that. Now I wasn’t on the retail space, but I’m acutely aware of the things that Billie is talking about and the nervousness that organisations have about either embracing this change or being seen to be embracing it for cynical reasons. And some of them do, the pink washing, rainbow washing, it really does happen. But, on the other hand, we have to be careful not to stifle where there is genuine awareness and pushes for actually helping spread the message.

So that can be very challenging and it’s particularly difficult now. There’s a school of thought out there that we’d be better off not doing any of this stuff. I’ve actually been invited later this year to go to the Oxford Union for a debate and the premise that it’s considering is that more harm than doing good has been done by the commercialisation of Pride. And that’s a valid consideration, are we actually going backwards by trying to be seen to be too visible? Are we just not going to create a cynical reaction against that? I don’t actually agree with that because I do think inherently that all awareness is a good thing, but you can see the point that they’re trying to make there and it is a challenge.

On a more practical level, one of the points that Billie was making was around systems and data collection. That’s inherently a problem for financial services and all organisations when you are trying to collect and use data meaningfully, not only because of the huge range of ways that they want to identify within the LGBTQ+ community, plus the intersectionalities that overlaid with that. But then trying to get that data, collect that data, in ways which make people comfortable when they’re inherently not, and then therefore be able to cut data meaningfully, to find out more about what the actual needs are. It can be a huge challenge. So, it’s an ongoing consideration for organisations, not least financial services, about how to collect and learn really what their customers, and indeed their staff, really do need because the data is difficult to collect and to interpret.

Julia: Listening to you two talk there, there’s a phrase that comes to my mind because part of it’s about being very comfortable with what’s being collected on you, comfortable with how you’re being represented, and also comfortable in the way that the organisations are championing and heralding their progress, or not, in this area. And it comes down to this question of psychological safety, which comes up a lot on the podcast as well. Geff, I’d love to stay with you and just get your thoughts about this, this is incredibly important in the context of belonging. How does this sit with you? And particularly in this context of celebrating difference, does that make people inherently less comfortable and feel less safe?

Geffrye: Difference is another word for diversity and we always talk about diversity and inclusion, leave aside the equity part for a moment, the old phrase of diversity and inclusion, I always say, “Diversity is equivalent to difference and inclusion is equivalent to celebrating that difference.” So you can have diversity without inclusion, which is actually not really achieving much, it’s just putting a lot of people who maybe look different or even think different in a space and not really finding ways to get more out of the synergies that that offers, to mine that for making it more than the sum of its parts. Only the inclusion overlay will do that. And that’s where celebrating difference is overlaying diversity with inclusion. And the overlaying of diversity with inclusion is how you create psychological safety. Psychological safety basically means that people feel free to be of themselves and to express difference.

And that can be differences of opinion, differences of perspective, differences of experience, and feeling free to do so in a way which is not going to create any detriment for them. If you don’t feel like you can speak up without there being some punishment for that, if you challenge received wisdom or you basically just ask, “Is this always the way we should be doing it?” BAU, let’s challenge BAU, “Is there a better way we could be doing this?” If you don’t feel like you could do that, then you don’t have that psychological safety to contribute. And organisations which embrace the importance of psychological safety get so much more out of the teams that work for them just because teams are more than the sum of their parts. And organisational learning is a team sport. Individuals can know a lot of things, but it’s where teams work together to create more than the sum of their parts that value is created and that can only happen if people feel safe to be contributing without fear of reprimand. That’s what psychological safety offers.

Julia: Billie, in the introduction, in your biography if you like, I was mentioning about, you talk a lot about the mental health elements of this and I wonder if I could bring you in here to get your thoughts about it. Is there anything with risk of overlooking when we particularly think about LGBTQ+ employees?

Billie: It’s a good question. The thing that came to mind when Geff was talking was actually adifferent perspective, which is from the perspective of the group that is trying to have inclusion in them. And I’ve noticed we have reached a point in culture, particularly in the queer community, where there’s a lack of patience and compassion and empathy for one another on both sides of the coin. And what I find really interesting is I find that it is very counterproductive to progress. And I think that sometimes we err on the side of cancel culture and that kind of thing where I’ve been surprised in my own experiences how that can be wielded in unproductive ways.

I’d like to give you a more specific example, non-binary pronouns, pronouns like they/them, people mess those up and I, myself, as a trans person, have messed them up in the past as well. It’s a natural linguistic thing to do, to fluff up your words, to get things wrong. And I’ve seen examples where we have worked towards being able to use pronouns that you’re not used to using and the people that get inadvertently misgendered is obviously an awful experience for them, but they approach it with patience and compassion. And I’ve seen the other side where people will write angry Twitter posts because someone messed up a pronoun or something and it turns into this frenzy. And I think that we owe it to ourselves as a community to have compassion for one another and to understand that there are differences to Geff’s point and there are differences of perspective and energy and approach to our liberation as a community. And I think that the queer community has reached a point where I’m personally concerned that we are sometimes doing ourself a disservice.

Again, similar to what Geff was saying of this idea of “Has pride become too commercialised?” If you look at the acceptance of gay and lesbian people in particular in the ’90s and early 2000s, a lot of that was through these tactics that we’re now saying, “Oh, wait, no good.” Media representation, representation higher up in businesses, things like that. Once we elevate and bring these people to the forefront, we can help make change because we’re in positions of power. If we say, “Oh, there’s actually no value in bringing trans women into the C-suite, for example.” We’re  just missing the point here, which is that the people that are currently in the C-suite are not going to just suddenly dismantle these systems or relinquish power, but there is a value to all of these different approaches. We should also be criticising pride every June as well as I did 10 minutes ago. But a multi-pronged approach is how we get there. And it’s not by pointing fingers at other parts of our own community and saying, “You are doing this wrong. You are a bad person.” We’re all just trying to be accepted and to be loved at the end of the day.

Julia: Geff, let me bring you in there because I’d love to get your thoughts in response to Billie’s remarks and also framed around the mental wellbeing point of view as well.

Geffrye: Psychological safety is if we think about that as something that we want to create, we have to remember it’s a two-way street. And if we want to be able to make mistakes, one of the key aspects of psychological safety is the ability to make mistakes without there being negative consequences. Well-intentioned mistakes are exactly that and what they are effectively are learning opportunities. They’re not something to be punished, they are actually something to be learned from. And we expect people to give us that opportunity if we are to contribute our full selves to the team or the environment that we’re in. But we have to give that to other people as well. We have to be open-minded to people who will make those well-intentioned mistakes that Billie was saying.

People will fluff their words. People don’t know this stuff. It isn’t necessarily inherently obvious to people who don’t identify as part of the community, how this should be phrased or how this should work. And we have to allow them to make those mistakes so that they can learn. And if we overly police them, if we cancel them, as you can probably tell, I’m no real fan of cancel culture as somebody who gets cancelled a lot just because of looking like a middle aged, middle class white cis man. I don’t look like I’m carrying awful minority characteristics, but I do understand the importance of listening to people who have that view. But if we overly cancel them and we chop them off and say, “You can’t possibly say that, that’s wrong.” Or, “You can’t have a view because you haven’t got lived experience,” we are doing ourselves a disservice and all we’re doing is effectively driving people away from the ability to be empathetic and compassionate about what we care about and that’s in the end ultimately doing ourselves no favours.

To your point around mental wellbeing, sorry it took me a while to get there, but it’s all related.  I mean obviously it’s fairly well established mental ill health disproportionately affects the LGBTQ+ community. I mean, Stonewall has produced endless statistics over the years and a few years ago demonstrated that over half of LGBTQ+ people have suffered within the last year from depression. And that includes really horrendous statistics around the amount of LGB and in particular trans people and people of particular age groups who have considered, or even attempted, suicide which is enormously disproportionately higher than the normal average of the population. And that’s just because the stresses and strains of carrying difference in workplace, and in life, where you can’t be yourself, just has an overall massively, horribly eroding effect.

If you can’t bring your full self to any environment and you have to hide, you have the ability to do that because you have a less visible characteristic, say less visible than say being of a minority ethnicity or having a different gender. It takes a choice for someone like me to be out at work, I could choose not to do that. And for half of my career, I did choose not to do that. And I look back on the amount of pressure and strain that put on myself, the mental effect or the mentally debilitating effect that had, it’s really, really a painful thing. And organisations need to do their best to understand and to find ways to ease that burden for their staff so that people can feel free to be themselves and they’re not putting themselves under those enormous strains.

There are lots of ways that they can do that, of course, and I could go into those, but I was actually designated as a mental wellbeing ambassador in my previous role when I was in my previous job at Macquarie. And that gave people the opportunity to just see me as a resource and come and tap me on the shoulder for a quiet word. If they just had something about LGBTQ+ which was affecting either themselves or someone they knew or a colleague or a friend or whatever, we could just go for a chat, things like that. And having employee networks where you can get a good safe space, buddy systems where people can make sure that they never feel alone, look outside the organisation to organisations like Mind Out or an app Voda, which is a mental wellbeing app that I’m proud to be an advisory board member of. More than anything, create an inclusive environment and an open environment internally where people can be themselves. That is the best antidote to the mental health challenges that LGBTQ+ people will face in the workspace.

Julia: It’s interesting listening to you talk. I mean, my career in financial services sounds very similar to yours, which was do not come out, it will destroy your career. And the burden of carrying, I always say, the most stressful thing for me was every Monday morning tried to avoid the question, “What were you doing at the weekend?” And I had strategies and I had ways in which to adjust. And if I had a mental health wellbeing officer at work who also had an empathy and an understanding of LGBTQ+ concerns, I think I would’ve had a very, very different career pathway in so, so many ways. I think it’s a great moment to welcome into the discussion Cynthia Akinsanya, who has some research to support the discussion today.

Cynthia: For the LGBTQ+ community, money issues are often impacted by identity. 62% of respondents in a survey by consumer credit reporting company Experian said that they’d experienced financial challenges because of their status as an LGBTQ+ person. Often people turn to financial products which haven’t been set up specifically for this community to serve fundamental needs. For example, trans people often turn to crowdfunding sites to raise money for surgeries, despite the extra service fee. Strategies like this show that the LGBTQ+ market is still underserved despite having a collective annual spending power of $3.9 trillion worldwide, according to 2019 estimates by LGBTQ+ corporate advisory and asset management firm LGBT Capital.

Julia: Thank you as always, Cynthia. I really appreciate the research and let’s take a few moments to remind everyone how to find DiverCity Podcast and that links to the research could be found on our website, divercitypodcast.com, where you could find all our episodes and sign up for early notifications of future recordings. Do also sign up for our newsletter called DE&I That Caught Our Eye. That’s where we share news stories and updates so you can stay on top of what’s current right now. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and DiverCity Podcast is available on all good podcast channels and we’re immensely proud of our five star ratings, so if you did take a moment to rate us, we would be most grateful because it actually all helps to promote the show to our global audience as well. 

I’m going to ask you both, if you would, to answer a question that I put to all our guests on the show and to let regular listeners all know that this is something that I take very, very seriously, particularly right now as we’re navigating interesting economic times, to say the least.

So I’m really curious to hear from you, while there’s a risk that this conversation about diversity, equity, inclusion could drop down the agenda, I want to hear from you, to see us out of the show, about why this absolutely must remain high. Billie, could I come to you first?

Billie: From a product or like consumer-facing side, diverse teams build better products and we’ve seen a huge amount of sentiment change towards large financial services institutions, particularly the big banks from marginalised communities, frankly, just being sick of being given products that are not designed for them. And so if you want to retain your customers, if you want to deepen your relationship with your customers, if you want to just build some more cool stuff, you should be doing that for diverse communities. And the best way to build for diverse communities is to have diverse people building for those diverse communities.

Julia: Well, if that’s not a compelling reason, particularly when we think about technology and innovation, I don’t know what is. Geff? The final words remain with you. If you would, again, give us a compelling reason why this must remain high on the agenda.

Geffrye: It’s no accident that I call my business the Inclusion Imperative because, for me, this is an absolute imperative. It’s an imperative for a number of reasons. And also that the motto of my business is making the world a more inclusive place, one organisation at a time. Organisations have enormous power and enormous responsibilities. Organisations create their own mini societies, right? That’s why we talk about these different models that they can have, whether it’s a “when in Rome” or an embassy model or an advocacy model. They create the rules, the laws within their world, and by channelling the power that they have, they can make a huge difference not only to the people within the organisation, but to the world outside. I mentioned at the very top of the show that we were talking about, one of the things that’s bothering me at the moment is the pushback against the LGBT rights and inclusion that we’re seeing around the world.

And organisations have enormous power and influence and reach and wherewithal and clout to make a difference in that space. We’ve seen many opportunities that they have taken over the years to protest against adverse laws and to make a huge difference. And those laws have been changed. There are plenty of examples I could give, but in the interest of time, I won’t now, but that’s very important. But this is not just altruism, as we’ve said earlier, and as Billie was just referring to, this makes business sense. As we were talking about psychological safety, organisations benefit from everybody being able to give of themselves and they can be more than some of their parts. It’s what Peter Drucker called the “Innovation compulsion”. “Innovate or die,” he said. And the only way to do that is to challenge, receive wisdom, be able to do that and bring the perspective of people who have a different lived experience and a different perspective to play in creating what I call “constructive conflict” that makes organisations able to progress and be better for the future than they are today.

Julia: I really appreciate your point about constructive conflict. Organisations as a society today, we probably don’t have nearly enough of that without running the risk of the cancel culture. But actually we must face up and embrace the difference and enjoy the challenge of the discussion around differences as well. Geff Parsons, Chief Empathy Officer, CEO, founder of the Inclusion Imperative. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

Geffrye: Very welcome. Thank you.

Julia:  Billie Simmons, who is the co-founder and the Chief Operating Officer of Daylight. Thank you so much for your time, all the way from Mexico.

Billie: Thank you so much, Julia.

Julia: And to everybody as always, thank you so much for tuning in and joining us. I’ve been Julia Streets. Join us soon for another episode of DiverCity Podcast.

Cynthia: This episode of DiverCity Podcast was produced by Roshan Roberts on behalf of Julia Streets Productions. You can find out more about the guests from this week’s show on our website. That’s www.divercitypodcast.com. That’s DiverCity with a C and not an S. Whilst you were there you can also sign up to our newsletter for all our latest updates. All our episodes are available in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favourite podcast app. If you enjoy DiverCity Podcast, remember to share on social media and give us a rating or review. And finally, our Twitter handle is @divercitypod. Thanks for listening.