Earlier this year, Joannie Diaz-Balbi was one of 20 women featured in Women of Color magazine's spring 2020 edition.
The list article, Champions of Diversity: Top Women in Fintech, focused on women of color leading diversity and inclusion initiatives at some of the oldest financial institutions in America and around the world.
More recently, Diaz-Balbi was featured in the Winter 2020 edition of the Syracuse Manuscript, a magazine published by Syracuse University's alumni.
In the "Alumni Profiles" section, Diaz-Balbi talks about how she manages corporate diversity.
As a finance and economics major at Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management, Diaz-Balbi said she didn’t know the field of diversity and inclusion existed. She credited female professors for changing the way she thought about corporate America.
The finance and economics major also said that it was networking with Syracuse University alumni working at JPMorgan Chase that helped her get her first job as a trading analyst.
Diaz-Balbi is still active with the Omega Phi Beta sorority and serves as a mentor to current students.
“There is a lot of my personal story that I bring to diversity and inclusion, which I think is important," she told Syracuse Manuscript. "If you’re working in the human capital space in any capacity, you need to have a passion for people,” she said.
As a student, she and two college friends launched a successful blog called Be Moxie as a platform to help young women of color. “We are all first-generation Latinas whose parents had emigrated from other countries,” she told the publication. “We wanted to give back to our communities and share resources so that these women wouldn’t miss out on the same opportunities we didn’t take advantage of because we just didn’t know.”
According to her LinkedIn page, after earning a bachelor's degree in financial economics, Diaz-Balbi went on to do an MBA at the NYU Stern School of Business, with a focus on leadership and change management, as well as strategy.
Early in her career, she did a three-month internship as an investment banking operations summer analyst at JPMorgan Chase in 2010. The same year, she also did a fall internship in Economical Conflict for Latin America at the Toledo International Center for Peace in Madrid, Spain. Over a two-period (2013-2015), Diaz-Balbi was a co-founder of Be Moxie.
During her trailblazing career, she has worked as a fixed-income trading analyst and development program manager and an associate for learning and development program management at JPMorgan Chase.
In May 2016, she joined Brown Brothers Harriman as assistant vice president and diversity and inclusion program manager. In January 2019, she moved to Bank of America Merrill Lynch as vice president, diversity and inclusion, a position she held for just over a year before being appointed Diversity & Inclusion Client Partner at Bloomberg LP.
