Discrimination is bad for business.

That’s how we expect most would see it here in tolerant, multicultural Greater Boston. And hand-in-hand with that is the idea that acceptance, inclusion and advocacy are good for business.

After acquiring Wainwright Bank – known in the communities it served as “the gay bank” – in 2010, Boston-based Eastern Bank became an institution with employees, resources and customers representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.

And earlier this month, Eastern named Gunner Scott to its board of corporators. Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, is perhaps the first openly transgender individual to serve on a bank board of any kind in the country.

“We’re asking folks to prove us wrong on that,” Eastern Bank Spokesman Andrew Ravens told Banker & Tradesman.

“Our governance structure has to be representative of the communities we serve,” Ravens said. Along with Scott, Kara Suffredini was also elected to the Eastern board of corporators.

Suffrendini is the executive director of MassEquality, a statewide organization that led the effort to protect marriage equality in Massachusetts. It is the only statewide, grassroots organization that advocates on behalf of the LGBT community in Massachusetts.

Suffredini is an attorney whose practice includes LGBT advocacy.

“Wainwright did a lot of outreach,” Scott said. “They really put themselves out there, and we called it ‘the gay bank.’”

Open Arms

When Wainwright was first acquired by Eastern, Scott said, “I was like, ‘oh, what’s going to happen?’” Eastern didn’t have a non-discrimination policy in effect for LGBT employees, and banks in Massachusetts have a history of mere lip service to the LGBT community, according to Scott.

But Eastern soon realized it would be a big mistake for any bank to turn its back on the customers of an institution it had recently acquired.

For Eastern, the LGBT community “is obviously an important market, and clearly their purchase of Wainwright played into it,” said Massachusetts Bankers Association executive vice president Jon Skarin. “These are the customers of the market they’re serving.”

And when a bank is looking for corporators, “they’re looking for people who are active in the community,” Skarin said.

But Eastern didn’t approach the LGBT community begrudgingly. The relationship began with the acquisition of Wainwright Bank, but its full-fledged embrace of the LGBT community began at the top with COO Bob Rivers.

“Bob ran with it,” Ravens said. “Discrimination is bad for business, and it’s just the right thing to do.”

Rivers called Scott personally to tell him he had been nominated as a corporator. Other banks haven’t approached the LGBT community with quite as much ease, Scott told Banker & Tradesman.

Scott said Eastern drafted a non-discrimination policy right away.

“They really stepped up to be inclusive,” Scott said. “In a way, that’s more than them slapping their logo” on a gay pride event.

‘Transitioning’

Scott has done training with other local banks, but that only goes so far. One bank Scott declined to name claimed to be open and respectful of its LGBT employees, but when one “transitioned on the job,” Scott said, the bank just couldn’t get comfortable with the change.

The employee “thought things were going well, she had been there a lot of years, but they let her go,” Scott said. “They didn’t fire her specifically for being transgender, they said, ‘oh, it’s an economic downturn.’ We hear a lot of that, actually.”

An employee doesn’t have to announce that he or she is transgender and planning on making a “transition” on the job in order for bank executives to be slightly uncomfortable, Scott said.

A new employee who arrives at a bank with a name change on his or her record opens the same, often uncomfortable discussion. It’s often a challenge for banks “to normalize that process so that it’s not unusual,” Scott said.

But it seems to have worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. Last year, a rainbow flag was flown just below the American flag at the Virginia Fed in recognition of LGBT Pride Month last June. “We strongly support a diverse and inclusive culture at the Richmond Fed and have learned that it is important to value and embrace differences, both seen and unseen,” Richmond Fed COO Sally Green said at the time.

The flag was flown at the request of PRISM, a group of LGBT employees and supporters formed at the bank the previous year.

The Richmond Fed’s decision to fly the rainbow flag is what Scott might call “cultural competency,” and it’s what he says he and Suffredini will provide Eastern.

If Virginia can do it with 14,243 same sex couples in residence, according to research conducted by the Williams Institute at the University of California School of Law, then surely Massachusetts can – there are more than 20,000 same-sex couples and 33,000 transgenders in the commonwealth.

“It takes more interaction, it takes a really deep cultural understanding of the community so that we can hold up the bank as a model,” Scott said.