 Good morning. I'm Ali Emdad. I'm the associate dean at the Graves School of Business in Management at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Also the founder and executive director of the National Fintech Center or the Center for the Study of Blockchain and Financial Technology for short we call it the Fintech Center. Today's session is a little bit different from all the other sessions that you've attended. It's not technical, it's it's more social and understanding of the landscape from the perspective that we have in the U.S. may be different in other parts of the world but my experience and my data is all related to the U.S. A little bit of data also came from the UK and just for reference for myself. And let me tell you what the approach is that I've here. The data that I found were mostly from the venture capital area and the problems and possible ways to begin addressing the issue of diversity. Then we talk about what role HBCUs can play in diversifying the workforce and also at the end I'll bring in an example of one of the universities and the type of activities that have been going on in the talk. I'll rely on data from different sources and the sources are a little bit that I tried on purpose not to go into the scholarly articles and instead whatever was available from various sources and by nature you'll find that the data may have some nuances and it may be from source to source you get different kind of statistics. If we look at the historical context minorities and specifically blacks have been locked out of the financial and credit building opportunities and as a result they're far more likely to lack credit histories and high scores that are required in order to accomplish one of the most prized goals in everybody's life owning a house or a car and that has been an issue for the underrepresented minorities and what we call the unbanked or underbanked communities. It is important to notice that if FinTech fails to address the issues that are related to diversity it will also be doomed to repeat the same mistakes and failures that it tries to address. The legacy financial systems have locked out many of these underrepresented groups so looking at some the landscape of FinTech about 15 percent of overall take employment is in FinTech and the total number of African-Americans that are executives in FinTech is less than 2 percent and in terms of the broader professional community the African-American representation is fewer than 5.3 percent. Chris Brommer a professor of law at Georgetown University did a study and came up with these numbers that were also reported by other sources so looking at the blacks and historic and Hispanics in the certified financial planning industry out of 87,000 certified professionals only 3.8 percent of them are blacks and Hispanics. That's a drastic number that we can cite. In terms of data collection differences and nuances you find it in many sources and I found that for instance SLAC had minorities in 13 percent of all positions and 6 percent in leadership positions. Google and Facebook had less than 4 percent of their technical positions filled by other represented minorities. The problem that the FinTech industry is facing is that in general it's like you say the people that are building the products don't look like the people that they try to serve which simply means that they don't understand what their needs are and that's one of the problems lack of understanding of the market that you're trying to serve so as a result this leads to issues very few women and racial minorities are among the FinTech founders and diverse groups of people are needed to develop solutions that improve the financial health for all. The selection biases are evident when there is a lack of representation from women and specific racial groups among VC partners. It's cited also that VC firms with no female partners invest in companies with women CEOs three times less frequently than VC firms with female partners in the firm. Fewer than 10 percent of partners at VC firms are women and also 2 percent or fewer VC partners are black. So these are drastic statistics and eye-opening in terms of the lack of diversity in these areas. By adding diverse voices to the conversation the industry can begin to address the lack of diversity and diversity once it's increased it also advances financial health. The gender gap, race gap in access to STEM education is another area that is cited as the root cause of some of the diversity issues. Another interesting information is that VC's value in network intros for new funding opportunities for the startups. Women and minorities on the other hand are not as easily let into the network and this is catch 22. How do you get into this system when it's closed and so we need again there is a need for finding ways to break that cycle. We also find that mentors and sponsors in companies that that have recruited minorities that mentorship and sponsorship of these new recruits is extremely important and but at the same time we find that 46 percent of men are 46 percent more likely to have mentors and sponsors than women and Caucasians are 63 percent more likely to have sponsored than professionals of color. The women and minorities have traditionally faced obstacles in starting up funding and VC firms typically do not understand the markets that the emerging minority communities trying to all minority entrepreneurs are trying to reach and the absence of this diverse leadership in a way has trickled down and infected the rulemaking and supervision at these different different financial companies. So where where are some of the sources? Where can you find the workforce that would bring in some diversity into into these companies. While the financial companies are saying that well qualified black candidates for the positions are not easily found the data shows that there are universities are producing graduates with degrees in computer science in finance in economics that can be attracted to these companies for instance 9% of graduates in computer and information systems where black many many historically college colleges and universities or HBCUs produce the largest number of African Americans that are that can be absorbed by these companies and many large companies have realized the opportunities and especially after the the killing of George Floyd in 2020 many companies have started paying more attention in recruiting black and minorities into their companies and we believe that the HBCUs are a rich source for workforce development and training for financial the financial industry and specifically for the fintech industry and it's obvious that fintech companies can can have a great impact but we need to think about it in a different way the new generation of leaders need to to emerge that they understand what what needs to be done to to diversify the workforce and also in a way disrupt the the big legacy financial systems and this is this is another issue that many companies keep talking about we need diversity is related to the talent pool and we need to focus on talent pool but it's not just simply a talent pool it's the issue is beyond beyond that it needs to be addressed accordingly how do you how do you accomplish that though we need to foster for instance an inclusive environment in the in the company in the firm and develop plans that not only recruits from the entry level but also from the top so you need executives that understand that diversity is needed in the executive suite but also entry-level positions need to be coming in once you recruit the entry-level positions then a plan should be in place so that they are nurtured and guided to succeed not to be left alone many of these new recruits probably need to understand the culture of the organization more than anything else and so in the minority community and the HBCU community for instance there is this apprehension that if you go work for this company you're probably after six seven months you're going to fail and you're going to leave the company so there is a feeling that needs to be understood and also worked and plan according to that have some meaningful plans to to make them grow and succeed we need to consider for instance we talk about the these universities all together have about 300,000 students and these students are diverse in their majors in their areas of study like any other university and they're very very successful some of the if you sample some of the graduates of HBCUs for instance in the US Kamala Harris the vice president of the US graduated from a socially black college Howard University and four-star generals in the military are also from some of these some top financial leader exitives came from HBCUs but they're far from a dominant kind of picture these are examples that the HBCUs can produce the workforce that excel and can be leaders at the national and global scene the CEO of Kenshin Alt was the CEO of American Express came from that kind of background so we have we have a lot of information on these but at the same time we need we need to find the reliable sources of data collection to so that the companies can can understand the landscape better and understand where they can they can go to collect information and have and we have access to reliable sources and data let me give an example of one of these historically black colleges and universities is Morgan State University I've been working at Morgan for a long time I worked at North Carolina went to Penn State from large predominantly white universities I went to this tiny university about now it has about 9,000 students and and I have been fortunate to to work at the university where I was given a lot of freedom to create programs departments created department of education systems in 1993 and and in over the years very very innovative programs were added and in 2018 we created the center the National Center for the study of blockchain and financial technology or fintech our our goal was to educate not only the university community in something that is evolving growing and we wanted to also train the students to get into the workforce with better understanding of what what these technologies are cryptocurrency cybersecurity data analytics all of these are important things that the students need to understand so we at the the National Fintech Center we created the mission was to also serve as a hub for all the other HBCUs there are 103 HBCUs in the country and we serve all of them more than 60 universities regularly come to our events as a result of our activities and we we try to again every time we have a program our goal is to to make sure that the the students come the faculty come and we do the training and we do the educational activities on that basis we are fortunate to receive funding from Ripple in 2019 2019 we got we got money multi-year multi-million dollar grant from Ripple that created the the energy that we needed in order to reach out to as many universities as we could and we became part of you see you know Ripple is is kind of unique in in their approach they they have reached out they created a structure where currently there are some 44 universities part of their system or network they created the university blockchain research initiative and in 2018 they created that initially there were 11 universities or 14 universities and Morgan became the 15th or 16 university in that system in that network but later we expanded our mission to serve all other HBCUs so we became an UBRI within UBRI so to speak it's a network within a network and these universities that you see in here are the the best around from around the world Delft Cornell and Carnegie Mellon Australian National University Duke UC Berkeley and so on and so forth all of these are part of part of the Ripple network so what we did for the HBCU community we created a network of sort and we identified people from all of these universities currently the list is I think 61 or 62 and we tried to do the the educational programming that would include workshops webinars course development and and all effort was really spent on on broadening the bandwidth and building capacity at these universities our ultimate goal is that we have student engagement and teach the teach the faculty to to be able to to go into classroom and introduce new topics so we started with a with a humble small group of 20 faculty and then he expanded within a few months he expanded to a larger number and in 2019 we had a summit in 2019 we had another one and gradually 35 universities joined us and so the concept of train the trainer was important for us from the beginning we wanted to make sure that the faculty have the technical understanding of what blockchain is what crypto is what is tokenization all all of these new concepts that the faculty didn't really know and hadn't heard before whether they were teaching computer science or finance or any of the other areas we brought them together and we expose them to these ideas and subjects so we did a workshop we called it the faculty Institute in New Orleans in 2019 and through a competitive process we selected 45 faculty from 30 universities they came to New Orleans and over three days they they got together in small groups they brought their laptops they we were in high-regency hotel in a huge conference from ballroom and we just worked they worked and developed their syllabi when they left they had notes and videos and everything they needed in order to go and teach the courses on their campuses so the impact was huge because 45 faculty go to 30 different universities and teach thousands of students eventually that was a huge impact we can't do all of these things alone we have to work with the industry in order to to accomplish our goals from the start we've had the the good fortune of working with David Boswell and Hyperledger Foundation they they were really partners from the beginning in in reaching out to all of these HBCUs they they offered us I got this email from David one day that said oh can we have a talk they found us and and they said well can you tell us what you're doing and we we search and we couldn't find any other HBCU we want to get involved with the video with the community and the rest is history we just methodically we worked on programming and we did so many different things and it again the the goal is to develop students as our future workforce where do you find talent where do you find the students that understand these technologies again at HBCUs we thought that that was our role and that was our goal with David's help and Ry Jones and Sean programs were developed we we offered an actual NFT development workshop and David reached out to some some of the community members and chain yard Mohan from chain yard came and brought in a number of programs programmers from their their company and we developed this excellent workshop that the faculty took to their computer science classes and they actually taught the courses using those modules we're doing data analytics workshops we're doing we actually are in the middle of a three-part workshop on metaverse demystifying metaverse is something that we're working on right now and several hundred students have have registered for these so we do you know all of these things the areas that we cover are really a large number of participants we try to to engage we have as pandemic forced us to go virtual we had two national conferences where we brought in the faculty and students to present and and discuss research papers projects that they were doing on their campuses and this November November 6-8 we're going to be in Orlando for an in-person conference and again this is this is the type of thing that we we believe would inform and educate the the community that we're trying to serve we as part of our activities we're doing at National Resume Data Bank and these companies are interested in in recruiting so we said let's create this database bring in the the companies that are interested in recruiting these students bring them to Florida they can meet and they can hopefully start discussion and get internships and get jobs job offers so we've had different types of workshops and I mentioned it again when we want to train our students and the future workforce you you want them to be knowledgeable in all of these areas understand so that when they join your company your team their not novices they don't that they have never heard of these these concepts some of them can be developers some can help with the marketing activities some can help with other and bring other valuable dimensions to the company we also helped student clubs blockchain club at Morgan we had the first one and then the students actually helped create other clubs at other universities so all of these activities the students are the driving force for us they they come to us with ideas we try to help implement those ideas and we try to to to make them succeed another thing that we've done is we've also used some of the funding that we have from ripple and we fund projects they range from five thousand dollars to ten thousand for papers research papers research projects that take several months and the researchers which are the faculty and graduate students at the at the universities they may use this fund to buy software or do recruit a couple of students to do work for them or do whatever they have to do in order to to accomplish their goals research projects that have ultimately published in top journals like IEEE ACM and so on and so forth journal of finance and some of the others really were proud of having a role in that and the the other aspect is again because of the pandemic we couldn't go to many places we were limited so we decided to fund different campuses to do their own innovative projects how to educate the students and faculty and how to expand this understanding of blockchain and fintech on their campuses so we funded innovative projects that were proposed to us and over the past two or three years we've funded 23 research projects and 25 innovative campus-wide projects another interesting thing for us was if if our students go into the crypto industry they needed to understand the crypto market and how to create wallets and how to use exchanges so in 2019 I met Catherine Coley back then she was the CEO of Binance US and I proposed that we could we should have a competition using Binance US as the exchange and Binance US would fund the students wallets and they can they can compete they give them a couple of months so with real money students actually competed over two months and they came up with some prizes for second third prizes and it was a fantastic opportunity our students performed really well initially we ran this twice initially 50 students from 10 HBCUs participated because Binance US at that point didn't have a whole lot of presence at all different states so we were limited on that regard but later on in the following semester we had a larger engagement and in two days the registration really closed because Binance had set the limit 100 no more than 100 wallets that they can create and then they did all the due diligence a KYC AML all of that to get the students their wallets and the CEO even Catherine Coley who's no longer the CEO but she actually came and taught a few workshops because the goal is that these are all experiential learning activities for our students and she taught portfolio management how to create portfolios using crypto and what are the different techniques to keep hold sale all of that it was it was extremely rewarding to see but anyway these are all all examples that I presented in here my goal is that we need to have this understanding that it is possible to have a diverse workforce the willpower has to be there planning has to be there it has to be company-wise it has to be thought through carefully appropriate people need to be assigned so that they can they can do the work mentors and sponsors can be identified and it's there are some success stories some of the insurance companies are doing this some of the fintech companies crypto companies are good examples they have a unit that is dedicated to ensuring that whoever they recruit from the minority community is going to succeed because their goal is to to expand diversity on their company and an interesting thing that I found was also during this research that companies the startups if they succeed and if they're in the mall to recruit they're more likely to recruit minorities than large established companies with thousands of employees okay so the the data that I presented here is you know not not the best that I could consider because it's not you know you go from one source you find something and then you find another source and they all have nuances and differences but there's there's definitely a need for some consistent data and surveys that need to be done anyway this was my presentation I don't have any additional slides to share with you but I'm happy to answer any questions um hear your comments yes um well we we actively recruit at morgan we that that's that's something that we are actively doing ripple itself has reached out to us many times and opened the and offered positions there are other universities that are doing the same thing the awareness is there but it needs consistent planning it needs persistent implementation and you know sometimes the the company goes through periods of growth and they want to recruit sometimes they don't have that and they lay off a lot of people and when you approach them and you ask them for any any opportunity for our students to intern or they say no we're in a in a period of slow growth right now we can't hire any more than maybe one or two right now is is a good example the crypto market is down and every time I hear every time I talk with anyone from these companies they all say the same thing it's just they're reading from the same script give you the same answer but overall in the past I've seen dozens of companies that come to the university and try to recruit is it enough no I don't think so I I don't think the the the market can absorb a lot more and but the companies need to do a lot more also to reach out if you go in just any Silicon Valley company right now if you look at the the the landscape and the diversity of the technical staff they have you may be a black program it may be just one in 30 or 40 in in the room so it is it is a problem some universities are making some inroads but it's it's a slow process yes a ripple network universities with University of Michigan and Michigan state are there you already have a population they just don't have the awareness of the program for the student ambassador so my question is in terms of the next step if I'm going to take information back home I need to know where to send them next next week I'll be in London at Ubrecht Connect it's annual conference of all these universities I showed you at part of the ripple network every year they get together and they present papers and discuss ways and and one of the areas is workforce development that I'll be I'm addressing and this is the first time the first year they had such a session planned so I think the information you're right the information needs to be shared with them people need to understand and and I begin I I've seen more willingness on the part of ripple as years came I noticed that ripple is reaching out more and more for diverse talent and they go to HVCUs they come to Morgan we broadcast it to all HVCUs any position that opens at ripple or any other fintech company we post it on our website and we reach out to our champions at all these HVCUs to broadcast it to their students because for us the success of our students is our success as well the more they they find jobs and internships the better for the HVCUs and also better for the company so I consider the win-win yes that actually the you know it's crypto is only one one small part of it but there is the DeFi the payment systems the DeFi in and alt finance actually is another huge area that we have we have a lot of engagement so it's not all crypto and the diversity of all these companies that the startups is an indication that the the fintech market is so so widespread and so diverse that you can accept a lot of newcomers a lot of entry-level positions although the startups don't have a whole lot of need for entry-level positions they need experienced workers experienced programmers developers to help them grow their company but once they get to the to the a little bit level of maturity they they tend to a higher more diverse population and we've seen also in the fintech industry we've seen that the minority community is is more active they tend to go to the fintech lenders neo banks and some of the others and get involvement in in in that sense compared to the traditional banking system that have shown a lot of biases and algorithmic kind of biases that existed and and still exist so so i think the the fintech industry can accept and absorb a lot more than just at the sliver of the market which is in the crypto yeah if you if you go to our website fintech.morgan.edu you find a lot of information but as a matter of fact if you forget just type the fintech center because we receive so much request for information that the fintech center pops up on your google search right away we have we have articles and also if you don't find something that you need and you want to get information if you write to us we share different google docs or google drive uh the url's video that would give you tons of information articles videos all of the workshops that we've done the videos are available also that we share with uh with our colleagues whether hvcu or non-hvcu okay but thank you so much for coming thank you for your interest see you