TALENT AND CULTURE FOR THE FUTURE
Strengthening leadership pipelines, organizational resilience, and workforce readiness in a changing investment landscape.
ILN’s Talent & Culture work focuses on how institutional investors develop, retain, and lead talent in environments shaped by long-term capital stewardship, technological change, and evolving expectations of leadership.
Grounded in the belief that strong investment performance is linked to the quality of leadership and decision-making, the Committee provides a forum for senior investors to examine the structural factors shaping talent outcomes, including progression pathways, retention challenges, and the conditions required for inclusive, high-performing cultures.
A cornerstone of this work is the Women in Investment Forum, a standing convening that brings senior leaders together for candid, peer-driven discussion on leadership pathways and the structural factors shaping careers across the investment lifecycle.
More recently, the Committee has expanded its focus to the implications of artificial intelligence for talent and culture. As AI tools move from experimentation to implementation, members are exploring how technology is reshaping roles, skill requirements, leadership expectations, and organizational design within investment institutions. Through closed-door discussions and expert engagement, the Committee supports members in navigating workforce transformation in a way that is responsible, practical, and aligned with fiduciary duty.
Committee Leads
Catherine Ross, Head of Private Credit, M&G
Prabha Ram, Managing Director, Global Equities, OMERS
The initiative focuses its efforts on the four following pillars:
Attracting and Retaining Talents
Evolve perceptions by demonstrating that women and other people belonging to underrepresented identities can be successful in the investment management industry.
Influencing Decision Makers
Engage ILN leaders on the importance of a diverse talent pool and factor diversity throughout investment processes, both internally and with our partners.
Rethinking the Workplace
Ensure that organizations are gender neutral and more inclusive in order to drive top talents’ fulfillment as well as innovation and business performance.
Building Accountability
Report metrics to increase transparency on diversity, equity and inclusion, and effect change through measurable and observable commitments.
Advancing the ‘S’ in ‘ESG’ Through an Inclusive Finance Initiative
The ILN knows that if investors fail to elevate social metrics to the maturity of environmental metrics, investment firms and our portfolio companies will be left vulnerable to important risks.
Through its Inclusive Finance Initiative, the ILN develops resources to help member firms and the wider investment industry factor inclusion across all identities into their operations, both as employers and investors.
This initiative began with the publication of a “state of the industry” report that assesses ILN members’ strategic approaches to inclusion to identify best practices, challenges, and areas of opportunity for investors to double down on the ‘S’ in ‘ESG.’
A principle finding in this report was that when paired with diversity, inclusion was becoming a better indicator of team performance and company returns than diversity alone. Further, by measuring inclusion, investors found that they could drive better outcomes in areas where they otherwise had limited access to diversity data.
ILN investors identified an opportunity to help investors improve their measurement of and engagement around inclusion by solidifying the business case for inclusion, introducing a reliable set of inclusion metrics, and demonstrating their best practices in implementing the metrics.
This opportunity informed the creation of ILN’s Inclusive Finance Playbook.
The Inclusive Finance Playbook provides investors with:
- The business case for assessing and engaging with inclusion;
- Sets of fundamental and advanced inclusion metrics;
- Case studies on how ILN members are using the metrics in practice.
The Inclusive Finance Playbook gained the support of several leading standard setters in November 2021 and February 2022.
ILN continues to work with investors and standard setters to implement the Playbook’s guidance across the finance industry.
Read the Inclusive Finance Playbook’s press release.
Access the Inclusive Finance Playbook’s executive summary.
If you would like more information on our Inclusive Finance Initiative, please do not hesitate to contact us.