Financial industry shows growth in ethnic diversity

Stan O'Neal, president of Merrill Lynch, Thomas Jones, chief executive of global investments, private banking and asset management at Citigroup, Adebayo Ogunlesi, head of investment banking at CSFB, and Vernon Jordan, senior managing director of Lazard LLC, are identified as some of the US's most powerful black people.

O'Neal ranks in first place overall. Fortune forecasts that he is likely to assume the mantle of leadership from David Komansky, the current Merrill Lynch chief executive, before the scheduled date of 2004.

Fifth-ranking Jones is mooted as a possible replacement for Sandy Weill at Citigroup.

Other bankers featuring lower down the list include William Lewis, head of investment banking, and Carla Harris, head of private equity placement, at Morgan Stanley.

Fortune's ranking should be good news for banks' diversity officers, who aim to boost the representation of ethnic minorities and women. However, the success of individual executives appears to bear little relation to more broadly measured diversity credentials.

O'Neal's employer, Merrill Lynch, is absent from Fortune's list of the 50 best places to work for minorities.

JP Morgan, which the magazine ranks as the most minority-friendly investment bank, failed to contribute to the list of most powerful black executives. It may well contribute in the future: 35 out of the 79 people who the bank is grooming for senior management positions are minority candidates.

Past success seems to have been due more to individual determination than diversity officers.

Jones at Citigroup is a former black power activist who led an armed takeover of a building at Cornell University in 1969.

The same militancy drove him to banking: "One of the new frontiers for African-Americans would be business. Clearly if America was going to be a more open society, then one of the testing grounds would have to be where the dollar was made - where significant wealth and resources were at stake," he said.