Richard Bynum, Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer
What is a bank’s role? At PNC, we understand that we are a pillar of each community we serve. We strive to be good stewards of our resources, to be fair to our customers and to provide not just jobs but rewarding career opportunities for employees. Conducting business on the strong foundation of our core values affords us the opportunity to thrive and become a good corporate citizen along the way.
Our core values, listed in detail below, were set in place many years ago because they are tenets of good business. Over the years we’ve learned that operating our business in line with those core values helps us to deliver for our customers, employees, communities and shareholders. We empower prosperity for all by adhering to our values.
As the pace of change across our industry and our nation accelerates, our focus remains clear and we continue moving forward as a company, building on that notion of empowering prosperity for our stakeholders.
We continue to serve as trusted advisors, responding to client demand for support in the transition to a low-carbon economy with a strategic approach that has deepened our relationships with clients. As an extension of our ongoing support for our clients’ transition plans, we expanded our environmental finance commitment announced in 2021 from $20 billion to $30 billion. This commitment mobilizes financing in renewable energy, green buildings, clean transportation, and sustainability-linked bonds and loans.
We’ve also made great strides in strengthening our strategy to manage our own environmental risks. We enhanced our approach to integrating climate risk into our overall enterprise risk management framework and established a new climate risk committee with a cross-functional group of impacted stakeholders. You can learn more about these efforts in this report and in our Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosures progress update.
From an operational standpoint, we’re proud to announce new, ambitious environmental targets inclusive of our significantly expanded footprint as a result of the BBVA USA acquisition.
Also stemming from the acquisition of BBVA USA is our $88 billion Community Benefits Plan, which began on January 1, 2022. Through this plan, we pledged $47 billion in financing for residential mortgage and home equity lending, $26.5 billion in small business loans, $14.5 billion for community financing loans and investments, and an additional $500 million in charitable giving over a four-year period. One year into the plan, we’ve deployed $35.1 billion to bring this commitment to life. That’s lending, investing and generational wealth-building that is empowering and transforming our communities.
Building a more inclusive financial services system is important to us. It’s why we focus on financial wellness, accessible banking services, expanded access to capital and enabling customers to move forward financially.
In 2022, PNC launched a task force to develop a comprehensive strategy to support Minority Deposit Institutions (MDI). Today, PNC supports more than 40 MDIs and provides a broad range of services, including investments, access to our ATM network, low-cost deposits and loan sales, and capital market and banking products.
Through our Community Development Banking team, PNC invested $10 million in Opportunity Finance Network, which seeks to bring more than $1 billion in capital from corporate and philanthropic partners to individuals and communities in America most under-served by mainstream finance.
In 2022, we also saw the launch of PNC’s Minority Business Development Group with the intent to deliver products, solutions, expertise and resources focused on advancing the financial wellness of minority-owned businesses. This effort includes voluntary employee advocacy training through the PNC Certified Minority Business Advocate program. To date, we have more than 1,200 Certified Minority Business Advocates across our employee base.
The number of PNC-Certified Women’s Business Advocates (WBAs) continues to grow as well, and we added more than 1,000 new PNC-Certified Women’s Business Advocates in 2022. In total, PNC has more than 4,600 WBAs helping PNC accelerate women’s financial equality. Through Project 257, PNC is bringing greater focus to closing the economic gender gap and a renewed sense of purpose to our 20-plus-year focus on supporting female financial decision-makers.
Diversity & Inclusion is a core value at PNC, and that won’t change. It is also a business imperative. Diversity allows for opportunity to be fairly distributed while inclusion creates a space for all of our employees and customers to feel welcomed, valued and respected -where every teammate can contribute their unique talents and perspectives to our success.
We will remain focused on promoting inclusion at every level of the company so that we can continue to support our employees and customers and deliver value for all stakeholders. To that end, we paid particular attention to growing our mentorship opportunities and expanding our Employee Business Resource Groups (EBRGs). In 2022, we grew EBRG membership by 25 percent and saw more than 2,600 employees participate in our voluntary mentoring program. Today, more than 30 percent of our workforce has opted into engaging D&I activities with their colleagues.
In 2020, we announced the expansion of our employee volunteerism program to include opportunities with qualifying social justice and economic empowerment non-profits. We now have a partnership with Sky’s the Limit to offer online skills-based volunteerism opportunities corporate-wide, and we have more than 100 non-profit partners across our footprint offering local opportunities to our employees.
At PNC we know that education is a powerful means for economic and social mobility. That’s why nearly 20 years ago we established PNC Grow Up Great, our $500 million multi-year signature philanthropic initiative to help prepare children from birth to age 5 for success in school and life. To date we’ve supported more than 8 million children and provided $225 million in grants to non-profits to advance high-quality early childhood education.
The significant progress we’ve made toward many of our goals and objectives is testament to the strength and talent of my 61,000 teammates who bring our values, priorities and business to life in our communities across the country. I want to extend a sincere “thank you” for their accomplishments to date and for their continued commitment as we advance our efforts to empower prosperity for all of our stakeholders.
