The Future of Finance Podcast

What happens when a pension investor stops treating sustainability as an add-on and makes it a third dimension alongside risk and return? Host Georges Dyer is joined by Geraldine Leegwater, CEO of PGGM Investment Management, and Colin Tissen, Sustainability Lead within PGGM’s Mandate Management team, along with handbook co-editor Bill Burckart. They discuss the PGGM chapter in The Handbook of System-Level Investing, “Fr...

The SEC's proposal to rescind Rule 14a-8 could change how investors and companies talk to each other. Georges Dyer speaks with Andrew Collier, Senior Director of Freedom to Invest at Ceres, about what the change would mean in practice. Andrew leads Ceres' effort to educate lawmakers on how restrictions on considering financially material risk affect investors, beneficiaries, and companies. The conversation is useful for anyone resp...

This episode is part of the ongoing System-Level Investing series, produced alongside The Handbook of System-Level Investing.

A trillion-dollar index manager and a $15 billion family office can both practice system-level stewardship, but the leverage points, and the duties behind them, are not the same.

Host Georges Dyer is joined by John Hoeppner, Head of Strategic Relationships & Active Ownership at Builders Vision, who pre...

This episode is part of our ongoing System-Level Investing series, featuring the chapter authors of The Handbook of System-Level Investing. Host Georges Dyer is joined by Max Messervy, founder of Oakledge Advisors and former Head of Sustainable Investment, Americas at Mercer.

They dig into Chapter 12, "How to Work with Your Consultant on System-Level Issues," authored by Messervy. This chapter is built around one foundational quest...

If system-level investing is now an operating imperative, the next question is how institutions actually see and manage these risks across the whole portfolio. Lynn Paquin (CalSTRS) and Adam Connaker (Surdna Foundation) introduce the Total Portfolio Dashboard—a new decision-support tool designed to help institutional investors identify, manage, and act on system-level risks and opportunities across asset classes and strategie...

With frameworks in place, attention turns to the realities of long-term implementation. Carole Laible of Domini Impact Investments recounts what began as a seemingly straightforward task—setting goals for forest asset management—and evolved into a complex systems challenge. As subsystems collided and objectives conflicted, the path forward proved nonlinear and at times confounding. This session offers a candid account o...

This episode is part of our ongoing System-Level Investing series, featuring the chapter authors of The Handbook of System-Level Investing. Most capital market assumptions used across the investment industry are built almost entirely on historical data, which is a methodology that's worked for decades but may be reaching its limits as climate change reshapes long-term economic trends.

Host Georges Dyer is joined by Scott Kalb, for...

Many institutional investors are caught in a bind: fiduciary duty requires them to weigh material risks like climate and workforce stability, while political pressure increasingly discourages them from naming those risks at all. Tynesia Boyea-Robinson, President & CEO of CapEQ and author of Just Change, joins Georges Dyer to unpack that tension, and what boards, CIOs, and asset owners can actually do about it.

Key themes:

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Physical climate risks such as wildfires, floods, extreme heat, are generating more data than ever, but institutional investors still struggle to translate it into decisions. In this episode, Eric Collins, co-founder of CRX.pro and former tech lead at the University of Washington's Climate Risk Lab, joins Georges Dyer to unpack why the physical risk data industry has a "last mile" problem, and what it actually takes to price this r...

Internal guardrails and standards achieve scale only when supported by coordinated field-level action. Featuring Cambria Allen-Ratzlaff (PRI), Fran Seegull (USIIA), Georges Dyer (IEN), and Josh Zinner (ICCR), this session examined field building as a critical—but often underappreciated—lever for system-level investing. Moderated by Chavon Sutton of Cambridge Associates, panelists explored how investors can shape shared ...

George Suttles is Executive Director of the Common Fund Institute, where he leads the organization's education, benchmarking, and professional development work for endowment and foundation investors. In this episode, Suttles joins host Georges Dyer to discuss how institutional investors are approaching sustainable and mission-aligned investing amid a shifting political and regulatory environment, a conversation relevant to any CIO,...

As fiduciary expectations evolve, so too must the shared frameworks and reference points that guide boards, CIOs, and investment committees. Moderated by Tynesia Boyea-Robinson (CapEQ), this fireside conversation marks the launch of The Handbook on System-Level Investing. Editors Jon Lukomnik and William Burckart discuss why the Handbook is arriving now—amid intensifying systemic risks, rising scrutiny of fiduciary practice, ...

Roy Swan, Head of Mission Investing at the Ford Foundation, joins Georges Dyer to talk about his new book, Positive Sum: How Zero Sum Thinking Broke Capitalism and How We Can Fix It. Drawing on his experience running Ford Foundation's mission-related investing program, Roy makes the case for positive-sum capital allocation, not as a values position, but as a measurable efficiency argument. For endowment leaders, CIOs, and trustees ...

In this episode, Georges Dyer is joined by Caroline Escott, Head of Investment Stewardship and Co-Head of Sustainable Ownership at Railpen, the in-house manager for the UK Railways pension schemes overseeing £34 billion on behalf of over 350,000 members. Together they walk through Railpen's December 2025 case study “Systemic Stewardship: The Financially Material Imperative” produced with the Investment Integration Proje...

Researcher’s View: Reframing Financial Markets Through a Systems Lens Genevieve Hayman, Senior Researcher @ CFA Institute Research and Policy Center To deepen the analytical foundations introduced earlier in the day, Genevieve Hayman of the CFA Institute Research and Policy Center presents findings from her 2025 report (co-authored with Raymond Pang), Reframing Financial Markets as Complex Systems.

The session explores why v...

Investor bias isn't just a philosophical concern, but a measurable drag on portfolio performance.

Daryn Dodson, Founder and Managing Partner of Illumen Capital and faculty member at Stanford Graduate School of Business, joins Georges Dyer to discuss how systematic bias causes institutional allocators to pass over high-performing managers, what peer-reviewed research reveals about how this dynamic intensifies at higher performance...

Fiduciary Duty in Focus Applying Fiduciary Duties to System-level Investing

Tools and dashboards are only actionable if they are grounded in fiduciary clarity. Maurits Dolman (Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, speaking in his own capacity) and George Suttles (Commonfund Institute) examine how fiduciary duty—properly understood—requires investors to consider risks and responsibilities that arise at the level of ...

Amy Jaffe, Director of the Energy, Climate Justice & Sustainability Lab at NYU, joins Georges Dyer for a rigorous, wide-ranging conversation on how institutional investors need to be thinking about energy risk, climate justice, and long-term capital allocation right now. As one of the most respected voices at the intersection of energy markets, sustainability, and institutional finance, Jaffe brings analytical precision and on-...

US SIF: https://web.cvent.com/event/e6c2819f-b8d1-4861-bc7c-21a6e47c6c66/summary

Institutional investors are confronting a structural shift in how risk, return, and resilience are shaped. Climate instability, inequality, democratic fragility, and market concentration are no longer peripheral concerns—they are system-level forces that increasingly determine portfolio outcomes. Yet the dominant tools of modern investment prac...