The Undergrad Fixing Finance

Bank of America, JPMorgan, and big-name hedge funds are trying to diversify. BLK Capital wants to make it easier for them.

- Ivan Levingston and Claire Suddath

One morning last June, Angel Onuoha took a train from Connecticut, where he was staying with a friend, to New York City. His summer internship at C.L. King & Associates Inc., a small investment bank, was his first real taste of the finance world outside the student financial clubs he’d joined as a Harvard freshman. It was also a reality check. After a month on the job, he says, he had yet to meet another black employee.

Onuoha knew that Wall Street lacked diversity, but on the train that morning he decided to do something about it. He remembered that his friend and fellow freshman Drew Tucker, whom he’d met through a campus organization for black men, was also interested in Wall Street—and that the two had discussed how the clubs did a poor job recruiting black students. So Onuoha texted Tucker with an idea: What if they started an investment fund that would give students hands-on experience and provide banks with a pool of talented black students to pull from?