Wall Street’s top bosses have pledged for years to boost diversity in their ranks. But the number of black people at some of the biggest U.S. banks is going in reverse.

At JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the percentage of senior black executives and managers fell over the past five years, according to U.S. workforce data compiled by Bloomberg. They make up no more than 2.6 percent of top positions at the three banks, lower than across corporate America, where the percentage is slightly better and ticking up.

Black diversity is also going backward for all U.S. employees at JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America Corp., where the percentage of black workers slipped to 13.1 percent from 15.2 percent in 2012. All three lag the active U.S. workforce, which was 14.8 percent black in 2015, the most recent year for which nationwide data is available.

There’s no single explanation for what’s happened or what it will take for the country’s biggest banks to live up to their promises. Current and former black bankers and academics who study them point to Wall Street’s unwillingness or inability to make changes. They don’t see enough consistency or creativity about hiring new people and helping them thrive in an industry where few black bankers have made it to the top.

“Look, we can call it not caring, we can call it not having the will, we can call it not having incentives, not having accountability,” said Martin Davidson, a professor of leadership at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business who has studied Wall Street’s diversity efforts. “Whatever you want to call it, the bottom line is there’s not enough energy and resources being put into figuring out how to catalyze this black talent.”

Some of the six largest U.S. banks showed improvement in the upper ranks. At Bank of America, black executives rose to 3.7 percent last year from 3.4 percent in 2012. Morgan Stanley, the only one of the firms that hasn’t released 2016 data, reported a slight improvement to 1.8 percent in 2015, still well below the U.S. level. The biggest jump was at Wells Fargo & Co., where black executives rose to 8 percent of top managers last year from 2 percent in 2012. Companies have some leeway to decide who counts as top management.

The numbers come from reports that businesses with at least 100 employees and contractors with at least 50 have shared with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for decades. It’s up to firms to release them, which not all big banks did until 2012. Wall Street isn’t alone: Black diversity also fell in the information industry, which includes parts of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the media.

The reversal for black bankers is happening even as Asians, Hispanics and multiracial people gained ground on Wall Street. The improvement was especially dramatic for Asians. At Citigroup, for example, they made up 12.7 percent of top managers in the U.S. last year, up from 7.7 percent in 2012, and 14.7 percent of its workforce from 12.8 percent.

There was only one black executive in that leadership group in each of the past five years, even as the pool expanded to 63 from 26, according to raw numbers the bank published online. That caused a drop to 1.6 percent.

“We are not satisfied with these numbers and are working hard to improve them,” said Elizabeth Kelly, a spokeswoman for Citigroup. Diana Rodriguez of Wells Fargo said the bank is “committed to increasing diverse representation at all levels.” Representatives of JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America declined to comment on the five-year trend.

Sergio Sotolongo attended high school in the Bronx and Princeton University before spending two decades at Goldman Sachs, where he was a managing director. He left in 2006.

“No one was wearing a white hood and sheets,” said Sotolongo, who was born in Cuba and identifies as African American. “But the whole idea was that the finance industry had in it a culture that was not friendly or receptive to change.”

Goldman Sachs didn’t name its first black partner until 1986, a year after Sotolongo joined and more than a century after it was founded. Decades later, when the small groups that run the biggest firms meet, there are still no black people around five of the six tables. At Goldman Sachs, there’s Edith Cooper, head of human capital management.

“I am frequently asked ‘what country are you from’ (I grew up in Brooklyn),” Cooper wrote in a LinkedIn post last year. “I’ve been questioned about whether I really went to Harvard (I did) or how I got in (I applied). I’ve been asked to serve the coffee at a client meeting (despite being there to ‘run’ the meeting).”

Goldman Sachs had a higher percentage of black executives, 2.6 percent, than the broader group of investment banks and securities dealers, but it lagged when it comes to overall workforce. The firm, which like Morgan Stanley doesn’t have retail bank branches, saw an increase to 5.3 percent.

“Our success depends on our ability to attract and retain a diverse employee base,” said Leslie Shribman, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman. Her colleagues are encouraged by the diversity of this year’s summer interns in the Americas, 13 percent of whom are black, she said.

Mandell Crawley, now Morgan Stanley’s head of private wealth management, said in a 2016 company conversation on race that he was often the only African American on his sales and trading desks. He mentioned Wall Street’s love for smashing phones.

“In my early years I wouldn’t dare do that, for fear of a long-held stereotype of the angry black man, and being six-foot-five doesn’t help,” Crawley said. “Now, it’s important to note I got over it, I’ve left many broken phones in my wake. But the reality is when people come here and you have to assimilate to an environment, and you feel like everything you do people are sort of assessing you, that becomes incredibly exhausting.”

Inside Citigroup and Bank of America, black employees are disappearing at a disproportionate clip. Both banks cut their U.S. workforce over the past five years, but the percentage of black workers fell more sharply—a 37 percent drop at Citigroup compared with 22 percent fewer workers overall.

Black diversity also fell at the middle-management level at Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan, where it dropped to 8.3 percent from 11.4 percent.

All six banks make a show of their inclusiveness online, where they feature photographs of smiling black people alongside pledges about the importance of diversity. JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon boasted about the bank’s overall progress in his annual letter to shareholders in April. Then he added an exception.

“But there is one area in particular where we simply have not met the standards JPMorgan Chase has set for itself,” Dimon wrote, “and that is in increasing African-American talent at the firm.”

It was a candid admission from one of the world’s most famous bankers. It was also a repeat of the same line a year earlier, almost word for word.

In his 2016 letter, Dimon said the bank was funding more scholarships, appointing a full-time executive and making “an incremental $5 million investment” to improve black diversity.

JPMorgan agreed to create a $53 million settlement fund this year to end a federal lawsuit over racial discrimination in a part of its mortgage business. Wells Fargo agreed to pay $35 million in December to resolve a lawsuit by six black brokers who alleged that the bank failed to give them the same career opportunities as white colleagues. The company said it didn’t agree with the claims.

Jared Johnson, an associate in JPMorgan’s asset-management division until May, when he left to attend MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said Wall Street has to do a better job of recruiting other black candidates and steering their climb.

“It is important to have colleagues at your level who look like you and share your experience as a black person in America,” said Johnson, 27. “But without a representative number of black leaders to look up to, it is hard to imagine yourself occupying a meaningful position.”