Trust Truist?
This bank needs to rebuild its credibility with non-activist shareholders.
Recently, Bowyer Research took part in a meeting with representatives of Truist Financial Corporation and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) to discuss a proposal from a shareholder which raises concerns about the company’s debanking policies. Concerns over politicization have surrounded the company for years, from their 2021 debanking of anti-illegal-immigration group ALIPAC to ending business relationships with private prisons over social pressure during the Trump era—Truist’s background of taking politicized stances merits serious consideration.
In this meeting, Truist’s representatives repeatedly asserted that these actions are no cause for concern. Bank representatives maintained that incidents of allegedly politicized debanking were not representative of the company’s current stance but holdovers from a previous era, before the merger of Truist and SunTrust, and in their words, “Before ESG became politicized.” This is a strange claim. Truist would like us (and by extension, you) to believe that their days of politicized corporate action are long gone. In reality, the private prison incident occurred in 2019, around the same time that BB&T & SunTrust merged to form Truist, and the debanking of ALIPAC occurred in 2021—roughly two years after the Suntrust merger. Truist is simply not providing an accurate timeline of when it engaged in politicized debanking.
The accuracy issues didn’t end there. Truist repeatedly asserted that their failure to fill out the most recent edition of ADF’s Viewpoint Diversity Survey on the grounds that they don’t do many surveys. Yet, Truist was more than willing to fill out a survey in the case of the LGBTQ-centric Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index—a survey on which they conveniently scored a perfect 100 in 2023. When confronted over this double standard, they asserted a blatant untruth: that the HRC Index is not a survey at all and they never actively participated in it.
This is verifiably false as per the HRC’s website, their 2023-24 Index contains info on “over 35 industries that opted into the survey” (emphasis added). Truist were willing to actively work with the HRC and toss out ADF. In addition, the executive from Truist who led the team in our discussion said that she had been unaware of the ADF survey and did not know who, or how, it had been filled out. However, ADF can show that the survey was sent to the official investor relations account and that the very executive who claimed ignorance in the matter was cc’d on internal conversations about it.
In the end, it’s really an indicator of how Truist views you: Bowyer Research is and always has been representing shareholders first and foremost, and it’s their interests that Truist shortchanges when it engages in politicized business practices, and offers defenses of its behavior that just do not appear to add up.
Truist strongly suggested that they would be willing to participate in a survey to see how they measure up when it comes to protecting true religious and political diversity. However, we made clear that work would need to be done to restore trust with shareholders who are concerned about politicized banking policies. Ironically, given its name, Truist has simply not yet earned our trust. And that was our message to them: they need to rebuild our trust.
