The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) just announced its 2025 “Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) Advocate Award” despite several major members of the trade group winding down their DEI programs after President Donald Trump’s executive order to restore “merit-based opportunity.”
SIFMA, the preeminent U.S. trade group for securities firms, banks, and asset management companies, revealed the winner of their annual DEI award on Tuesday to be the DEI chief of Washington, DC law firm WilmerHale, Yoon-Young Lee.
Notable members of SIFMA include Bank of America, BlackRock, Capital One, Citigroup, Deloitte, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Wells Fargo — most of which have all but abandoned their prior DEI goals since Trump’s return to office.
The president’s January 21 executive order, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” prohibits private companies, including financial institutions, from conducting any DEI employment programs for jobs funded by federal contracts.
A late February Bloomberg report revealed major changes coming to Bank of America (BoA), with a source saying the North Carolina-based company will no longer have “aspirational” DEI goals. An annual report released that week by the bank replaced numerous references to “diversity” and “equity,” switching out the words with “talent” and “opportunity.”
“We evaluate and adjust our programs in light of new laws, court decisions and, more recently, executive orders from the new administration,” a BoA spokesperson said in a statement to the outlet. “Our goal has been and continues to be to make opportunities available for all of our clients, shareholders, teammates, and the communities we serve.”
BoA is also set to change the name of an internal “diversity and inclusion” human resources group to “opportunity and inclusion,” the source revealed.
Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser told staffers around the same time that the company’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Talent Management” team will be renamed to “Talent Management and Engagement,” and that the institution will end its diversity hiring goals, Bloomberg reported.
A mid-February Wall Street Journal article also revealed that JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley were “removing or watering down” their DEI efforts, while Wells Fargo had begun reviewing its DEI language.
The Wall Street Journal reported that BlackRock also recently removed references to DEI in its annual report — just three years after CEO Larry Fink said the company “must embed DEI into everything we do.”
Deloitte employees working with U.S. government clients were instructed to remove gender pronoun identifiers from their email signatures and to roll back its DEI programs, but the London-based firm’s staff in the U.K. were told that diversity “remains a priority,” the Financial Times reported earlier last month.
Goldman Sachs also dropped a diversity requirement for companies it takes public and slashed its DEI section from its latest annual filing, Reuters reported.
CEO David Solomon said the changes were made to “reflect developments in the law in the U.S.”
In Capital One’s case, the entire section labeled “Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging” in its 2024 annual filing was missing from the 2025 release, but the company still has its DEI webpage up.
Despite Trump’s anti-DEI order, SIFMA’s website states that there is a “business case for DEI,” citing a study by McKinsey that found that “companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on their executive teams were 21 percent more likely to experience above-average profitability than companies in the fourth quartile” — though the trade group acknowledged that “correlation does not equal causation.”
