My late mother worked the night shift in the local jam factory to ensure we had the best education and her work ethic inspired me to try and achieve the highest grades academically to give me the best chance of success.

The opportunity to work on the trading floor arrived through a family connection who introduced me to the relatively secret world of interdealer broking. This is very much how the industry has always worked. To many people, the trading floor conjures up images of loud brash men shouting at each other surrounded by screens and waving at each other in some secret medieval sign language and, honestly, when I first started 22 years ago, this was pretty much on the mark. The energy is infectious and the desire to close deals is addictive.

This had a positive effect in some ways, creating a highly entrepreneurial environment, and incentivising brokers to build strong relationships with traders and seek out new products across asset classes. It was also a largely meritocratic industry with a simple philosophy: If you could generate revenue, others would revere you regardless of creed or colour.

However, as an ethnic minority it goes without saying that I experienced the casual racism that was so rife back then. When I first joined, the ‘P’ word was often used conversationally to describe brown people like me regardless of the term’s inaccuracy. Thankfully, this would be wholly unacceptable now. But it was something that I accepted without resistance, mostly so that I would not appear troublesome and so that I could ‘fit in’ more.

A part of me believed that I was lucky to have even been given the opportunity to work on the trading floor and have access to opportunities that were outside the realms of what my parents could dream of. That meant that I always had the feeling in the back of my mind that it could all be taken away from me at some point.

However, one of the profound impacts of the Black Lives Matter movement of recent years has been shining a light on the extent to which ethnic minorities have, for so long, accepted the status quo, whether that is casual racism or not being offered the opportunities that are frequently offered to others.

Indeed, this week, reboot, a voluntary campaign group focused on ensuring momentum is maintained around race discussions in the workplace and UK society, released its Multicultural Britain 2022 report alongside the research firm Opinium. It found, among other things, that 64% of people from an ethnic minority background reported experiencing discrimination in 2021.

This signals a drop from the 73% of ethnic minority respondents who reported experiencing discrimination in 2020. While there is a slight drop in numbers, I think we can all agree that this number is still alarmingly high. And yes, progress is being made, but we need to make sure it is not incremental only.

Certainly, closer to home, there has been progress in my sector, but more needs to be done to drive diversity on the broking floor. This desire to drive change pushed me to undertake a study on the diversity of the trading floor as part of my recently completed Executive MBA programme from the Judge Business School (University of Cambridge). The results were both astonishing and depressingly predictable.

The interviews with participants from different organisations indicated that, despite a meritocratic environment, access to all levels, particularly senior positions remains extremely limited. The ritualistic nature of trading floors means that individuals who do make it, hold back from sharing cultural experiences for fear of ridicule and exclusion. Recruitment, just like by my own hiring 22 years ago, is still driven in part by knowing people in the sector. Inevitably this means that brokers are frequently hired that fit an existing mould. Having the same like-minded individuals simply results in the same ideas, and ultimately, a lack of creativity.

My passion is to try and change the status quo. As co-chair of the TP ICAP multicultural network, I have an opportunity to instil this. My firm has a genuine desire to lead the charge in our industry, identifying five key diversity pillars to focus on. Building a multicultural community is central, alongside others which focus on gender, social mobility, age, and sexual equality. We also need to focus our recruitment strategy to consciously hire a more diverse set of employees throughout the organisation.

At the ground level, we have started working with schools and universities that have broader ethnic representation to encourage people of all backgrounds to pursue a career in financial services. Our aim is to attract people from communities that previously never considered the sector or simply assumed that they would be denied access.

While it will take time, we need to drive change at all levels, from interns to the C-suite. We need our executive decision-makers to be representative, to be truly authentic and also to promote policy initiatives that improve the diversity of the workplace. It is imperative that those at the top of institutions represent all of society to make true progress.

This is why the work reboot and other organisations do are so crucial to the industry; they ensure that the conversation around diversity and inclusion remains consistent and continue to hold up a mirror to the industry to highlight how much more needs to be done to achieve true parity in the workplace.

We are at the start of this journey and whilst we know this will take time, as Mahatma Gandhi said: “The future depends on what you do today.”

Shekhar Karia is a reboot. ambassador, managing director at TP ICAP and a trustee for the Young Urban Arts Foundation