BlackRock, Inc. (BLK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Now we're going to turn it over to our panel discussion entitled Best Practices in Supporting Opportunities for Veterans. We have an absolutely incredible panel with leaders from across industry and government. I'm very happy to turn the program over to our moderator, my colleague, Ed Skyler. Ed is Citi's Head of Global Public Affairs, and he's the co-leader of Citi Salutes, along with John Tien. Ed, over to you.

Thank you, Chris, and thank you for your service, and thank you for your contributions to VOWS and Citi Salutes. You've climbed at the ranks of Citi as an organization, but your contribution to the veteran community, both internally and across Wall Street, continue to grow in significance. So we thank you for that. We do have a great group of guests today, and I want to welcome everybody to virtual VOWS. We were excited to see you have the opportunity to host VOWS before everything went virtual, but we're making -- as we're all doing in life, we're making the most of it. And it's great to see so many people logged in and watching. First, we've got Suni Harford. Suni is a Citi alum. She's now the President of UBS Asset Management. She's one of my predecessors as a co-Chair of Citi Salutes, matter of fact, actually was a founder of it as well as a co-founder of ALS. We have Commissioner James Hendon. James is a Commissioner of the New York City Department of Veteran Services, they're such a large veterans community in New York City, that there's a whole city agency devoted to their interest. So thank you for joining us, Commissioner. Thank you for your service. Nick Lane, an important friend of Citi as well, who's the President of Equitable. We have Bruce Mosler, who's the Chairman of Global Brokerage at Cushman & Wakefield; Christiana Riley, CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas; and Gary Shedlin, the CFO of BlackRock, who also joined us early in the summer for a great conversation that we had. So we're going to dive right into it. Let's start with Suni. So Suni, you were one of the original co-founders of VOWS. Why -- tell us a little bit about why this organization started and give us a little bit of a report card, looking back in the last 10 years on how well we've done.

Well, you have to start the answer to that question, Ed, noting that when we all sat down and talked about founding VOWS, we envisioned a 3-year need. And so 10 years later, it's fun to reflect back on where we were. There was a large increase on the veterans coming out of the service, President Obama, true to his campaign, promised to start bringing the troops home. So there was hundreds of thousands of veterans that were coming out of deployment and looking to get into the civilian workforce. So they needed jobs. They needed services to transition. And financial services, as we found out and went around and asked around, weren't doing anything. In fact, no one saw it coming, I don't think, most of corporate America was missing the point and had been very insolent in their approach, if they had any at all. So the 3 years has become 10 years, over 100 companies actively engaged in VOWS. Actually, the number is much higher than that. People come and go in terms of their ability to interact with us over it. The partnership we have with Bob Woodruff, thankfully, came in early days, I think maybe 3 years after we've been trying to manage our own events. Chris will remember this, it was not an easy thing. It has resulted in thousands of jobs, millions and millions of dollars to veterans and service organizations that need that help, including our caregivers, which is one of the things that Bob Woodruff was so wonderful about. So all of those things, I think, give us great marks. We honestly thought the need would be fulfilled. So silly us, we didn't appreciate how long term this need would be. But it is real and it continues to evolve. I think most proud, when we look back, and I do say we, all of us, on what we've accomplished is that VOWS became a model for other industries in terms of how to build a coalition, how you take what was the most competitive industry in the world and making noncompetitive commitment to help our servicemen and women as they return home. With something that was great, and we're very happy and proud that those things have been emulated in different industries, whether it's the legal industry, the technology industry, the pharma industry, lots of different groups are looking at us to follow our lead, which is terrific.

Great. Thanks, Suni. So we'll turn it over to Nick. Nick, you're a marine veteran, as Chris will be happy to know. And I want to hear a little bit about the transition that you need. Tell us a little bit about your path, why you chose the military and what were some of the challenges that you faced in your service that helped you as you climb the ranks of an incredibly important U.S. company?

Well, great. Thanks for having me. Happy Veterans Week and an early 245th Marine Corps birthday here. I had a great Marine Corps journey. It allowed me to grow as a person. It allowed me to grow as a leader. My journey started my junior year out of college. I did the OCS program out of Princeton. And then following the military, the GI bill helped we pay for business school. And it's funny, you mentioned challenges, I can remember going down to officer candidate school and meeting Platoon Sergeant -- Staff Sergeant Peters. And from that, he was my drill instructor, and realizing the proverbial I was not in Kansas anymore, I was going to face some new challenges, some new experiences. And I think for me, that's what the military did. It was how do you approach challenges, how do you have this focus on continuous learning, really anchored, I would say and persevere and adaptability and creative problem solving. The mantra of be prepared for the next war, not the last war. And those experiences have really helped me throughout my professional career here, whether it was in 2008 when I was leading strategy for AXA, we had 160,000 people in 60 countries, and we had to completely rethink our business model. In this period, I would say, of economic, health pandemic, a period of important racial reckoning that's going on, how do we evolve our business model and approach challenges from new dimensions? The second for me was, I would say, as a leader, I had won 2 National Championships in lacrosse, but leading my infantry platoon, it was probably the most diverse group I have been part of. And how do you bring people together under a common purpose, a common cause and the attention we all feel as leaders, which is, first and foremost, take care of your people; second, accomplish the mission and really, the importance of training your people to do your job, be prepared to take over your job and do it better than you. I recently was CEO of our Japanese country -- company. And I would say those leadership lessons, connecting with people on a humanistic level and connecting with people around a sense of purpose, were invaluable. So for me, the military was all about how do you challenge yourself to bring out your best self and how do you overcome those challenges in the best way.

Thank you. I want to turn it over to Gary Shedlin from BlackRock. As I mentioned earlier, Gary joined us during the summer. We had a great conversation with Lieutenant General Vince Stewart, talking the Air Force on the topic of racial equity. And it was really an interesting conversation about how to support the blacks and other minorities. And you see what the military can do when they hadn't done historically about getting better representation on the top ranks. But turning it over, Gary, as the CFO of the largest asset manager in the world, you guys have a unique ability to really support the veterans community. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing not only to attract veterans but also to retain them?

Sure, Ed. And let me just echo everybody's thanks for having us here today. And special shout-out, Chris, to you and thank you for your service. And also as a former Citi alum, to Suni, thank you for your leadership in making amazing organization to what it is today. BlackRock is proud to participate in VOWS and proud to be here today. So look, in terms -- yes, we are the largest asset manager. Unfortunately, our ranks of employees are not nearly the size of some of yours. We're 16,000 strong, but we're trying to do our part nonetheless, and as we think about attracting better, as I think everyone has talked about the amazing characteristics and leadership qualities and professional potential that all of the veterans bring day in and day out to our great organizations, and we 100% agree with that. And we are trying as hard as we can to bring many veterans to BlackRock as we can and to be actively involved in their position from the military to civilian life. We've done a few things here in terms of trying to be more active in that journey. We've dedicated an HR professional full time to try and to bring as many veterans as we can to our professional ranks here at BlackRock. I think that's obviously critically important, to be organized and focused in that regard. We're trying to utilize career fairs for transitioning military life in service academy, career conferences, where we're trying to be actively involved in participating there. We're making a significantly larger use of social media to emphasize our commitment, obviously, as part of the -- of D&I more broadly. We talked about diversity and inclusion, racial equality, really trying to amplify those messages in a much more significant way through social media. But perhaps the most important thing we do is we utilize our employee network, which is called the vet network. And I think we probably got -- and these statistics are always a little hard to get your arms around, but we probably have about 250 vets here in the U.S. alone. The network itself is 600-plus strong, and that's much more of a global network. And we're really trying to use the extensive network of our veterans. And all the people they have come to know throughout their distinguished careers to make sure that we're amplifying all those messages that we are a welcome home and want to bring in that talent because it can be so immediately additive to the firm. So I think really, those are a number of the things we're trying to do to attract that kind of talent going forward, Ed. On retention, I think -- let me just say the first thing, obviously, is we want as many of these amazing people to come to BlackRock. But the reality is, as long as we can help transition veterans from military to civilian life, wherever they end up, we have so many great firms represented here today. We view that as a win. And I know that, frankly, we have limited ability just in terms of what our year-to-year hiring is, but we want to be as helpful as we can. And that's why we've actually partnered with American Corporate Partners, which we think is an amazing organization, both in terms of our people's time as well as our dollars, to help become mentors and sponsors to transitioning military and those who are already in the beginning of their professional careers outside the military, to really help them basically stay wherever they think they have a fantastic career. But again, retention, we're relying on our vet network, which is a dozen or so employee network here we have at BlackRock. Again, to engage our veterans, to foster and support their families, to mentor them, again, much more in terms of peer interactions to make sure we can give me them the guidance and the advice they need to be successful. We're trying to really engage in philanthropy. BlackRock, this year, we'll probably have donated about $1 million to veteran-related initiatives, whether it's American Corporate Partners, whether it's the USO or even React, which is the U.K. partner [indiscernible] organization. And that's been very important. As you mentioned, hosting or cohosting events, whether with General Stewart or General Dockins, we think that kind of awareness and visibility for our veterans and their potential is incredibly important. Holiday packages, being involved with fleet [leave] with the USO, and then probably our biggest initiative started by 2 of our own, Aaron Lehn and Nick Nefouse, is our Vests for Vets campaign. I'm probably wearing our 2020 model, which has just come out this week. And this is just an initiative that we have literally hundreds and hundreds of employees of BlackRock who will be wearing their vests, on Veterans Day, Remembrance Day to honor our veterans, their families. Proceeds from that, go to American Corporate Partners. This is our second year. We are looking for many corporate partners to join our initiative this year. And for those of you who are interested, please Google the BlackRock Veterans Network, and we would love to have you join our initiative next year, and I'd be happy to set you up with our colleagues to make that happen.

Okay. Thanks, Gary. I want to turn it over to the Commissioner. For those of you who don't know him, he is a West Point grad, served with distinction in both Iraq and Afghanistan and even, apparently, he's a former investment banker. Don't worry, nobody on this crowd is going to hold that against you. But also he's spent a lot of his time supporting the veterans community in the private sector, trying to infuse entrepreneurship and other initiatives and continues to serve as a U.S. Army reservist. So thank you for your service in the public sector as well, and I want to throw into that for a minute and tell us what do you think local governments can actually do to support the local veterans in their communities.

Well, first off, thank you so much for having me here, Ed. And I just -- a shout-out also to Deutsche Bank alum, to Christiana, also here from DB. Specific to what the local communities can do for veterans, I think that to address all of the veterans who were listening, regardless of what municipality you're in, what city, what state you're at, you've got to know that, that city, that state, that town that village likely has some sort of an active measure to try to work to be right by you. And I can speak to a few things we do here in New York City. But to be clear, I have peers in other cities across the country, and I touch base with them, and it's all different flavors of the ice cream, but it's all ice cream. I just want to just call out a few things that we do here in New York City. One of them is tying in our veterans to -- one of the things we do is hire veterans into our Workforce One initiative, which is something that our small business services department has, which helps a veteran who comes in and says, "Hey, I need a job and I need additional connections to be able to obtain that job, and help getting my resume right.", helps connect those dots, so someone can land in the right place. And that's our Workforce One initiative. Also known as Priority One, specific to veterans. Another thing that we do is our Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities has a job board called NYC at work where these are employers who are specifically open to bringing on many women who have disabilities. And here in New York City, 17% of our veterans have a service-connected disability. It's 41% when you look at just post-9/11 veterans. We have a service-connected disability of some sort. And so it's good to have employees who say, "Look, I have no problems with bringing people on who are in this particular area." As far as our friends over the aging department, not just in New York City but nationwide, roughly 70% of all veterans are older than the age of 55. And so there are significant employment efforts for that older cohort. And with the senior employment program that our Department for the Aging has, it takes a person who is in that age bracket, who's of a certain income group, and says, "Hey, we will pay for you to have a part-time job for a 4-year period." And that's a federal program. So that's something that is impactful to seniors who are veterans across the country, so it's something to think about. And just to give you the other things that we're doing, we've partnered with a great group, the GI Go Fund, who's one of our Vet Connect partners to a platform we have, and they've set something up called Empire Vets, where empirevets.com is a platform where you, as a local veteran, can go and see job opportunities that are available to you, not just in this region but more broadly. And with the empirevets.com platform, what it does is it takes your MOS, your military occupational specialty, and it marries that with whatever you say your civilian experiences and credentials are, and it's almost like an eharmony where it matches you and says, "Hey, we think these are some good employees for you to look at. Press here if you like for us to begin to auto-populate as best we can their online intake tools." And that's one that we've been heavily bullish on, to kind of tell our veterans and take advantage of it. Two other ones I'll mention, and then I'll stop on this one, is New York is a city that is of finance but also it's a city of construction. And so our school construction authority partners have a program called the Opportunity Academy where regardless of your background, they will train you up to be able to take a back-office job in the construction space. And so it's a great bridge for our veterans to go from whatever career they did before or go straight from military into construction and move up the ranks, fitting in at the weight class at which you are appropriate once you leave it. And the last one, I've just spoken at some city auctions, Ed, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Vet Connect NYC, which is our own online platform where we're able to connect veterans to various resources beyond the city services. So if it's something like being tied in with IVMF's Onward to Opportunity program. That's something that we would do through vetconnect.nyc.org. If it's something like being tied the veterans job submission, which I know JPMorgan is a strong partner within, we [tied them to] that through Vet Connect NYC. Same thing goes for vets jobs. And so for us, it's -- we've got things cooking at the city level, and it's not just New York City but across the country, municipalities, we have things that we do to be right by our veterans. But beyond that, all of us have some sort of organism -- tool that we use to tie you into everything else, to make sure you know what else is cooking beyond what we have to offer.

Thank you, Commissioner. I'd turn it over to Bruce Mosler, he's Chairman of Global Brokerage, Cushman & Wakefield. And Bruce, it's hard -- spends a lot of his time, obviously, not just serving clients like Citi but also to go to the veterans affairs issues. And he's been recognized, including getting the U.S. Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation Commandant's Leadership Award and the leadership in [support of] the military by the New York City and New York Council Navy League in the United States in 2017. So somebody who really knows these issues well, he's dedicated a lot of his life to them. And I want to ask you, for the nonveterans that are joining us, and want to know how they can out what are the best ways they can champion and support the veterans community.

Well, thank you, Ed. Good morning to all. What a privilege to be here, and I want to thank VOWS, Chris Perkins, the Woodward Foundation, for allowing us this moment. And as you know, Cushman & Wakefield is a leading global real estate services firm now with 52,000 people worldwide, over 101 years of proud tradition. And during my 25-plus years, giving away that I've been around for a little bit, of leadership here in various different roles, including on 9/11, serving as CEO from 2005 to 2010 and through the Great Financial Crisis, now as Chairman of Global Brokerage, as you mentioned. I will tell you that now, more than ever, we are operating in a highly competitive and increasingly complex environment. This just goes without saying. Five years ago, at Cushman & Wakefield, we realized, like so many others, that we needed an edge in order to continue our traditions of excellence, innovation and leadership. Our veterans initiative program, quite frankly, is that edge. Make no mistake, the VIP's primary mission at Cushman & Wakefield is always has been and always will be to add value to our firm, our clients and our veteran community. We will not dilute the fact that this program was created in self-interest and not for charitable purposes, knowing that there is an untapped reservoir of unique talent coming out of the military each and every year. We know the numbers. Over 200,000 transitioning service members annually make up the second largest renewable source of talent outside of campus recruitment. The critical difference being, and this is key, Ed, we know that this population is highly diverse, highly educated and has real-world experience performing under pressure in those no-fail competitive and complex environments I described earlier. But perhaps, most importantly, Ed, they understand the values and ethos that we need at Cushman & Wakefield and, frankly, at every one of these firms here today, they understand the values and the ethos that we need to continue our firm's traditions of industry leadership and success. These men and women are, as my friend Jake Wood would say, defining threads in the tapestry of C&W's culture. Our team leaders here have a common vision: to make this initiative the industry's premier veteran recruitment and service multiplier program in the country. It's dedicated to increasing our bottom line revenue while simultaneously enhancing the firm's reputation as the industry-leading veteran employer of choice. And if I could sum it up in a word, what you get when you hire our veterans today is culture. And frankly, what all of us have been talking about is the meaning of culture. Culture counts. So I'm really grateful that we have this moment to talk about the import of veterans. And I'll simply say this, we have more work to do. It is difficult to interpret veterans' resumes. But candidly, at the end of the day, they bring so much more to the table. We know at our organization, the more veterans we hire, now over 1,000 strong, we know that generally speaking, their leadership, their proven ability to work under pressure, Chris Perkins earlier in the program called it their resiliency effect, we know that veterans on a peer basis outperform their peer group. And for all of those reasons, we're blessed and we're fortunate at Cushman & Wakefield. But I know that I speak for everybody on this call today, we're blessed and fortunate that we have a pool of talent like the veterans to select amongst -- and make sure that they're in the right jobs, that the jobs that we hire them into are sustainable jobs. It's essential that you hire a veteran with care, with thought and into the right job so that they have a career path with mentorship for a long time. And commissioner, before I go, I just want to say thank you for what you're doing each and every day, it makes a great deal of difference. So over to you, Ed.

Thanks, Bruce. And we'll hear from Christiana Riley, she is the CEO for the Americas Deutsche Bank. Deutsche Bank has been there from the beginning of VOWS. I remember going to an event on the intrepid and seeing their logo on the board and the entry, and thinking, "Deutsche Bank, really?", but they have a proud and a rich tradition of supporting veterans and a great history in it. And it's something that is very meaningful to see. And we like to hear a little bit from you about what do you think is worth the best in your firm to support the veteran community.

Thanks, Ed, I appreciate it. It's an honor for me to be here myself for the first time. Greetings to the Commissioner as a valued and honored alum who can attest, I think, as you say, Ed, to the firm's decade-long support to this community. And in fact, the way we have engaged and supported the veteran community for the past 20 years of the firm's expanded history here on U.S. shores has taught us also a lot about how we have been engaging on our broader diversity and inclusion agenda, which, of course, has picked up a lot of wind in the past couple of months given events here in the U.S. I think what we've learned a lot about how do we best support the veterans community within Deutsche Bank, because being an attractive employer is one thing but it's about making sure that we're including and creating the right culture and offering the right opportunities to be supportive that will ultimately lead us to retain and successfully develop staff within our organization, it's been about the opportunity to really listen and learn from our veteran community and then take the necessary change where it's appropriate to make sure that we're really needing the needs of that community. And I think when we do that appropriate process of listening and learning, it really leads us to all of the great things that, as a firm, we've done, and I can imagine other panelist around the phone have done as well, in terms of creating the right opportunity for balance, right, and recognizing that there's often a lot more going on in the lives of our military veterans in their desire stay connected with their community and to continue to serve where duty calls and looking and listening to the right ways to offer [indiscernible] it's why we are incredibly proud of our military lease policies at the firm that far exceed USERRA standards. That, and many other less tangible ways that we're just making sure that, that ability is there. And given as many other panelists have also talked about the core purpose of this organization is around providing opportunities, I wanted to also take advantage of the fact that this forum is happening virtually today, not just attracting participants in the New York area and talk a bit about Deutsche Bank's opportunities also outside of the New York area. The fact that we operate a large operation center down in Jacksonville, Florida, which is very connected down there to the military community, actively hiring db.com\careers. So if that's something to panel -- to participants here of this forum outside of the New York area that's of interest, I wanted to be sure. Certainly, our firm, I suspect many others represented around the phone were talking about opportunities here broadly across the company and the country and would love to see participation in those. So Ed, I'll hand it back to you.

Thank you, Christiana. We also at Citi have a big representation down in Florida and actually a big outpost near Tampa, and we are able to view off some of those that are serving in the Central Command there as well. So it's a great point that Veterans on Wall Street isn't just about Wall Street, and it's about the national footprint that a lot of these firms have. So thank you for bringing it up, and I think it's a great point. Nick, I want to come back to you and talk about the subject of the support system because, as we know, nobody does it alone. And I want to hear a little bit about how other veterans have helped you throughout your private sector career and how you've supported other veterans personally through mentorship or other support.