Sustainable Finance
Your first steps in Diversity: Introducing the ABBL DEI Guide
Published on 03 February 2025
In today’s workplaces, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are not just buzzwords—these are essential components of a thriving, innovative, and future-ready organisation. Businesses that embrace DEI not only foster a sense of belonging but also gain a competitive edge in attracting talent, improving decision-making, and driving financial performance.
Summary
Why this guide?
The ABBL’s commitment to DEI stems from a simple yet powerful belief: inclusive banks are stronger banks. Research consistently shows that organisations prioritising diversity and inclusion benefit from greater innovation and productivity, improved employee engagement and retention, broader talent pools and even stronger financial performance.
Despite these benefits, gender pay gaps, unconscious bias, and barriers to leadership positions for underrepresented groups remain significant challenges. Our guide aims to provide clear, practical steps to help businesses move from awareness to action.
The Building Blocks
The first Factsheet of our guide lays the foundation for understanding DEI by breaking down its key concepts into short, digestible explanations with real-world examples, from the notion of diversity, to intersectionality, direct and indirect discrimination or unconscious bias.
We also explore how DEI as management practice has evolved over time and across jurisdictions. Our guide traces its roots in the US Civil rights movement and how it crossed the Atlantic in the 1990s to find its place in European workplaces.
Finally, DEI has been supported locally by key initiatives and actors for decades. Our Factsheet closes with an overview of these leading stakeholders and projects that have pioneered inclusion in Luxembourg businesses.
What’s next?
The release of The Building Blocks is just the first step of our ABBL DEI Guide. Further factsheets to be released throughout 2025 will explore the regulatory context on DEI, how to craft successful DEI policies and strategies that meet expectations of regulators and stakeholders alike, and best practices gathered directly from ABBL members.
We invite you to read the first Factsheet which has gone live this week, and join the conversation on how we can collectively build more inclusive workplaces in the banking sector.
Reach out to our advisers to learn more about the ABBL’s work on DEI: Elisabeth FRANSSEN (elisabeth.franssen@abbl.lu), Thomas COLLIN (thomas.collin@abbl.lu)