Company: Ally Financial
Innovation Title: Ally’s Moguls in the Making: Building a New Generation of Entrepreneurs
Company Website: www.ally.com
Year Introduced: 2019
Executive Summary
Ally’s leadership has weaved diversity, inclusion, and equity into how the company was built, how it serves customers and communities, and how it welcomes teammates. At Ally, diversity isn’t just what we can see — it’s how we engage with one another and our communities to lift each other up.
As part of our commitment to financial and social inclusion, Ally leaders collaborated with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund to start the Moguls in the Making program – an entrepreneurial pitch competition that engages students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Program goals: 1. Empower Black and Brown students to find new pathways into business and let them show their creativity and problem-solving skills; 2. Develop a diverse early talent pipeline for the company and support the development of future leaders.
Through 2022, we’ve brought 36 Moguls on as interns and 12 have joined Ally as full-time employees in technology, finance, product development and marketing. Moguls gave the students unique networking opportunities, and access to top-tier business leaders, in addition to critical skill-building seminars and mentors. Moguls helps the next generation of talent see their own unique paths to high-wage careers in technology and financial services, and it supports economic mobility among diverse communities. In the first four years, Ally has hosted more than 200 HBCU students, providing $500K in scholarships.
Morehouse College took home the top prize and $20K scholarship for each student in 2022.
At Ally, we know that more diversity brings better ideas. The inaugural Moguls program in 2019 led to the development of Ally’s popular Fintropolis financial education game for middle schoolers, patterned after the popular Minecraft universe and built by Blockworks. A four-person Moguls team came up with the idea, pitched it to executives, prototyped it, and Ally’s tech and design teams brought it to life with their help. Fintropolis goes a long way in teaching basic financial concepts for middle school-age students, now even more critical with some states passing legislation requiring that high schools teach financial literacy courses. As players explore Fintropolis, they learn about earning money, paying taxes, budgeting, building credit and managing debt, as well as investing. The results have been staggering: the game has been downloaded 3.5 million times and hundreds of students have taken part in Fintropolis gaming sessions at home and in after-school programs.
Not only has the Moguls program made an impact on HBCU students, but it has also helped Ally build a diverse talent pipeline while increasing awareness of our company’s purpose-driven ‘do it right’ culture; Moguls leans into Ally’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and allows our teammates to volunteer their time to help students build their business and financial skills. The program also addresses our corporate commitment to building a more diverse and equitable workforce, providing a blueprint for using innovation to enhance economic mobility, and identifies and nurtures qualified-candidates of color. Ally will welcome its fourth cohort of HBCU interns (and their innovative ideas) from the Moguls program in May 2023.
