‘Progress on diversity would be 10 black bosses in the FTSE 100’

As the 11th annual Black British Business Awards approach, we speak with former finalist and current judge Cecil Peters on the change the awards can bring about, and his own career so far.

Mr Peters has enjoyed a distinguished career in banking technology and joined JP Morgan to run a software engineering team in 2018.

During the pandemic he pivoted to a full-time focus on diversity, equity and inclusion across JP Morgan’s EMEA business, encompassing 36 countries and more than 30,000 employees.

He leads a strategy covering disability, gender, ethnicity, LGBTQ+, and military veterans in the region.

Mr Peters tells us how he got started in tech, and how George Floyd’s tragic murder led him to make a big career shift.

How did you get into technology – was it a passion from an early age?

My passion for computers began when I was very young. I went to school in Ealing Broadway and there was a WH Smith that had Sinclair ZX80 computers on display. I spent many an hour after school standing at the display, with a computer magazine, copying the programs and learning the computer language BASIC.

We didn’t have computers at home in those days, they were not normal affordable things. However, I was bitten by the computer bug, and my mother managed to buy me a Sinclair ZX81 as a combined Christmas and birthday present. A year later, she told me that she purposefully did not buy any games for me, as she wanted me to learn to write my own games. She basically enabled my career.

How did your career lead you to JP Morgan and how would you describe working there?

I was running the cyber security program at Credit Suisse and I was approached to come to JP Morgan in a cybersecurity role, where the environment and the culture were spot on. The culture was open, and there is a real focus on all diversity, which was refreshing.

How did your work shift from the tech side to the DEI side?

I joined JP Morgan in a software engineering function as part of a global team. But then in 2020 George Floyd’s murder occurred, and a number of our senior leaders in technology encouraged everyone to talk about race and racism, bias and cultural difference.

I think it’s important to encourage people to talk about these traumatic events, as opposed to bottling them up and feeling like you’re just living with a situation. So it was really helpful to talk, but also it empowered me to articulate the challenges and difficulties of being different, and talk about the hurdles to career progression that I had faced in my career.

At the same time I was working on a number of really impactful projects to increase opportunities for diverse businesses, in terms of how we diversify our supply chain. The work I had been doing caught the attention of the full-time diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) leadership, who invited me to apply for a role as EMEA Head of Advancing Black Pathways, one of our seven DEI centers of excellence. I was successful in my application and within a year an opportunity to extend my responsibility for all demographics in the region occurred and I was appointed EMEA Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. I am now into my fourth year as a full-time DEI professional, working with an excellent team of dedicated professionals.

And how did you get involved with the Black British Business Awards?

In 2020 whilst in my cybersecurity role, I was nominated for a senior leader award, representing the work my team had been doing, developing patentable technology which was at the leading edge around cyber security products on the cloud, and as the lead for that function I was nominated.

I have to be honest, I didn’t know much about the Black British Business Awards and felt I didn’t fully understand the value of it when I was nominated. However, I then looked a little bit more into what the objectives were – which were to really align with purpose on the inequality in senior black role model representation across all industries, but also visibly within the media, within the ecosystem, within TV, everywhere .

The awards wanted to ensure black people were also being celebrated for the impact they create. The objective was to normalize the belief that our vision of what a leader of a business looks like is as diverse as the communities that exist around us.

Once I understood this, my perspective on the whole awards changed and I saw the opportunity post-George Floyd’s murder to speak about my tech experience and success to encourage future generations.

Although I did not win an award, once I moved into my DEI role I was invited back by the awards team to join the judging panel. I often joke that as I didn’t win I came back as a judge a year later to right the injustice.

The year I was nominated was a wonderful opportunity to meet inspirational people and the person who did win that year was an amazing, amazing leader. And I was proud just to be nominated. The awards made me really think about how I’m using my platform for change and for good.

How did you find being a judge for the Black British Business Awards?

The first time I was a judge was a little nerve-wracking. People had been judges for a number of years, and they’ve done it before. I’d never done it before. So I just wanted to learn, really, and learn what the process was from their side. These people were also established and successful in their careers, while I felt I had only just moved into a new specialty and I had a lot to learn.

I’m very passionate about seeing people’s growth, that journey, whether it’s someone who is at the start of their career or a senior leader who has been in the workplace a long time. Because, you know, we’ve got to enable a space for the future generations.

What would you see as a milestone symbolizing change?

It would be meaningful to see more ethnically diverse representation across the top roles of the FTSE 100 companies in the UK. Of the top 100 firms in the UK, we’ve seen an increase in female leadership, it’s not parity with men, but at least you’re seeing a percent of the chairs are women. 10pc of CEOs are women, and 25pc of CFOs.

There’s some real significant opportunity to continue to diversify our leadership, and we’re recognizing it, and that’s what’s so important. But we haven’t seen the change happening for everyone yet in these big institutions. I think there’s an opportunity. If everything was based on demographic representative numbers in the population, you might hope to see 10 to 12 black leaders across the FTSE 100.

The Telegraph is the media partner for the Black British Business Awards.