Priscilla Sims Brown is the president and chief executive officer of Amalgamated Bank, the largest union-owned bank in the United States. She has 30 years of financial services experience.
Before joining Amalgamated Bank, Brown was the group executive for marketing and corporate affairs at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where she focused on rebuilding trust and pride in the bank and had direct responsibility for end-to-end marketing, branding, stakeholder insights, government and public affairs, and environment and social policy. For the past three years, she served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA), a U.S. Fortune 100 financial services firm with over $1.2 trillion in assets under management. She served on the TIAA Investment, Nominating and Governance, and Corporate Governance and Social Responsibility committees, as well as Trustee and CEO selection subcommittees.
At the mission-driven Amalgamated Bank, Brown has taken a stand on several initiatives.
When the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take away the constitutional right to abortion on June 24, 2022, Amalgamated Bank immediately announced that it was prepared to cover travel costs for any of its employees and their dependents who needed to travel out of state for access to reproductive healthcare. “Our guidelines were designed to ensure our employees and their families have the needed resources and access in order to make personal and confidential decisions regarding reproductive healthcare,” Brown announced at the time.
She had Amalgamated Bank lobby the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) for creation of a new merchant category code for gun stores and gun purchases, so those could be easily flagged. Brown told Time magazine the new category code is meant to help stop gun violence by cataloging “illegal gun purchases, which can lead to gun violence, because it is one of many steps in a process to identify illegal activity,” she said. “There are certain patterns that gun criminals follow. If we can identify those patterns ahead of the actual crime being committed, we may be able to address the illegal purchase prior to the crime.”
Brown has also pushed for Amalgamated to maintain environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) standards, by encouraging the bank to dedicate itself to climate-related lending. According to a 2022 press release, Amalgamated is the “first U.S. bank to set full portfolio targets under the guidelines of the U.N. Net Zero Banking Alliance of 49% reductions in 2030 and net zero greenhouse emissions in its financing and operations by 2045, Amalgamated Bank was also the first to receive approval of the targets by Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).”