FIS Chairman, President & CEO Gary Norcross on Advancing Business Roundtable’s Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

Business Roundtable
2 min readAug 14, 2020

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As I look back at the past year, I am most proud of the way our more than 55,000 employees around the world have risen to the challenge of supporting our clients and the global economy, especially during the pandemic. This reflects the central idea of redefining the purpose of a corporation — being held accountable to success for all stakeholders.

As a critical infrastructure provider to the financial services industry and society, our top priority at FIS during these unprecedented times has been, and continues to be, protecting the health and safety of our employees, providing continuous support to our clients and their mission-critical operations, and helping ensure all people have access to the digital economy. We have done this with remarkable poise and resilience.

I am firmly convinced that our ability to support our clients and the global economy during the current crisis is directly related to the diversity of our global workforce. Workforce diversity and inclusion has always been one of our core values at FIS and key to our success and competitiveness. As a multinational enterprise, we serve diverse clients and communities, and by having an employee base that reflects the markets we serve, we can better understand and provide solutions to meet our clients’ needs.

As a leader in our industry, we recognize and take seriously our responsibility to do more for our employees, customers and communities we serve. In the light of racial unrest in the U.S. and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minority communities, in 2020 we have redoubled our commitment to build a workplace where diversity is not only welcomed but celebrated. Specifically, we have committed to:

· double the representation of black and latin-x leaders;

· deploy mandatory unconscious bias training for all employees;

· double our supplier spend with minority-owned businesses by 2023;

· invest $30 million in minority-owned fintech startups;

· donate both dollars and volunteer hours to organizations that support financial literacy and inclusion.

These initiatives are part of our broader commitment and investments at FIS to attract and retain the highest quality people to further our mission of advancing the way the world pays, banks and invests. I consider this among my most important responsibilities as Chairman, President and CEO, and it is one that I, the rest of the management team and our Board of Directors take very seriously.

Collectively, on the first anniversary of this transformative statement, the global business community is living up to this aspiration and FIS is proud to be part of it.

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Business Roundtable

Business Roundtable is an association of CEOs of leading U.S. companies working to promote sound public policy and a thriving U.S. economy.