Invested in Change from Within

By Monique R. Herena, Chief Human Resources Officer and Senior Executive Vice President, Marketing & Corporate Affairs
Jul 19, 2017 12:30 PM ET

Invested in Change from Within

As the Investments Company for the World, BNY Mellon is privileged to serve exceptional clients, many of whom are the world’s leading investors. We help investors pursue their personal goals and financial dreams and we help drive growth and prosperity around the world.

While these goals are our North Star, the way we get there continually evolves with the world around us. As we have been since our founding, we are invested in change, relentlessly curious and constantly innovating to support our business purpose and the needs of our stakeholders and society. Our CSR strategy unites us around creating an inclusive, sustainable world that empowers people to succeed and economies to thrive. 

We’re extremely proud of the positive impacts our CSR programs have made, but we know we can do more.

We believe a holistic, fully integrated approach to CSR can have a much more powerful effect than siloed programs can have on their own. This means coordinating interdependent programs that create shared value for our firm, our clients and for society, and leveraging support from our most senior executives. Our CSR programs will not all address the same environmental or societal challenges, but they will all align with our vision to improve lives through investing.

In 2016, we saw the opportunity to begin this integration and make bigger strides toward realizing our vision. We formed a new division called Global Citizenship & Sustainability, which pulls our existing functions of Diversity & Inclusion, Philanthropy, Art, Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Investing into one strong portfolio. This integrated, multidisciplinary, global group respects and maintains function-specific integrity while creating one voice for internal engagement and marketplace influence. It allows us to coordinate our resources, drive economies of scale and execute against a shared strategy for significantly more impact.

We are confident this new integrated approach will more effectively support long-term business success by driving employee engagement, deepening societal and community impact and leveraging alliances in the market. It is already bringing our global enterprise strategy to life. One example is our "Return on Equality" white paper, created in partnership with the UN Foundation. This groundbreaking piece shows how investing in companies whose products and services promote gender equality can help investors capture profitable, under-tapped market opportunities while advancing gender equality at scale. Our Diversity & Inclusion, Social Investing, Philanthropy and CSR teams collaborated on the content, funding, promotion and distribution of the piece, demonstrating how coordination across functions works for maximum value. We will follow this model of business strategy alignment, partnership and collaboration as we look for more opportunities to leverage our collective strengths.

At BNY Mellon, CSR is not just a philosophy. It is a company-wide strategy that brings together innovative ideas and tangible programs to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems and create positive change. Our outcomes show we are strong, safe and trusted and have a high-performing, winning culture where people do their best for all of our stakeholders and, in turn, fulfill their sense of purpose. Invigorated by the integration of our full CSR strategy, we will continue to build on our strengths, drive results in areas where we can make the most impact and help people and society realize their full potential.