Rising to the challenge
Boards and investment committees must rise to the current challenge, with governance models needing a pivot to respond to the new social distancing norm. Roger Urwin outlines a virtual investment committee model.
Boards and investment committees must rise to the current challenge, with governance models needing a pivot to respond to the new social distancing norm. Roger Urwin outlines a virtual investment committee model.
David Villa, CIO of the $110 billion State of Wisconsin Investment Board is worried about the outlook for returns. As a result he’s significantly underweight sovereign bonds in favour of cash. But he’s also positioning the organisation to do better analytics for more complicated portfolios, another result of a low return environment. The fund is working on at least five data and technology projects and has hired a chief technology and operations officer.
SWFs are long-term investors and will weather whatever storm is coming, says Majed Al Romaithi, chair of IFSWF and executive director of the strategy and planning department at ADIA, who also encouraged investors to consider risk in a more “sophisticated” way.
Rising consumer awareness of health and environmental concerns has coincided with a boom in innovation and technology in the food sector. Investors have an important role to play in encouraging their investee companies to understand the scale of the shift and to adopt a strategy to leverage innovation and new technologies to drive long-term value creation.
The way the business community is approaching AI is fundamentally incompatible with civil rights, according to Vivienne Ming, co-founder and executive chair of Socos Labs, an independent think-tank that explores the future of human potential.
Financial professionals must learn to leverage disruption so that it can be used to clearly establish our purpose and our value to our clients and our investors. CFA Institute's CEO Paul Smith argues we should not fear it, nor should we fight it.
Governance