Leading by example

Profiles of leaders at BNY Mellon

SHIFTING PERSPECTIVES

Senior female leaders are plentiful across BNY Mellon and its businesses - from the C-suite to sales, from technology to engineering. Here, three leaders in the business of managing money discuss their roles in finance and why diversity matters.

Stephanie Pierce, CEO of BNY Mellon's $372bn cash business Dreyfus and its $470bn indexing specialist, Mellon (assets as at 31 December 2023).

In the investment industry for more than 30 years and with BNY Mellon IM since 2019, she joined Goldman Sachs after graduating

from Stanford University. “I cut my teeth through a number of market events and crises,” she recalls. “Between 1994 and 2001, there was the Mexican peso devaluation, the Asian economic crisis and the tech bust. I sat on a trading desk and saw what happens when markets freeze and you can hear a pin drop. That’s how I learned about market structure.”

Stephanie says the route to CEO was not a linear one, seeing her move from the sell-side to the buy-side and from international to domestic equities and multi-asset. With each move, she managed increasingly larger teams. Looking back, her key takeaway is that, as an executive, you can’t be an expert in every field. A strong leader is able to diagnose a situation, understand the problem and solve it by bringing together the right people, she says, comparing it with being the conductor of an orchestra. “You have to understand the role of each instrument and how to bring them together to create a symphony, but you don’t need to have played all the instruments yourself.”

Making investing accessible to a wider slice of society is something Stephanie is passionate about. She argues the asset management industry has its work cut out to close the gap with underserved groups.

Stephanie says one of the biggest challenges facing the industry today is getting women to be both practitioners and customers, particularly if they don’t see anyone they recognize or to whom they can relate.

Women coming up in the organization, and even my teenaged daughter, see all these female faces on the screen and say, ‘If they can do that, maybe I can too.’ It gives motivation and encouragement to the next generation.

Stephanie Pierce

Leveling the playing field between men and women goes right to the top at Mellon and Dreyfus, where 75% of the leadership team is female. The BNY Mellon ETF board of directors is also 50% female (March 31, 2023).

Who was her own guiding light when coming up in her career? “There were definitely role models,” she recalls. “Most of them were men but I think the important part is how they behaved toward me and others.”

Stephanie recalls one senior partner who took her under his wing when she was in her 20s and gave her opportunities to develop and try new things. Another who, no matter how busy he was, always ensured that when talking to her he came out from behind his desk and gave her 100% of his attention, she says.

“I learned those things from some of the best. If I can give those experiences back to my direct reports and cascade them down then I think we are paying it forward."

Besides giving people the opportunities to succeed, how else does she aim to inspire others? She says above all, leaders must have passion: people love to work with people who love what they do. On a personal level, what drives her is learning new things and being able to build businesses and teams. “I like a situation in a molten state – think of clay before it goes into the kiln – when you have an opportunity to shape it and make it your own, whether it’s a product, a team or a business.”

Sinead Colton Grant is chief investment officer at BNY Mellon Wealth Management, with total client assets worth $312bn (as of December 31, 2023).

Diverse perspectives can generate better investment ideas by identifying underappreciated opportunities and viewing potential risks through a different lens.

Sinead Colton Grant

With nearly 30 years of professional investing experience, Sinead Colton Grant has navigated through an abundance of unprecedented events as well as the continued evolution of the financial industry. It all started with a summer vacation in Italy, where she was caught off guard when she exchanged Irish pounds for Italian lira and received more lira than she expected. This was because of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) crisis, which prompted the Italian central bank to adopt measures that devalued the lira, in turn resulting in Sinead's pleasant surprise. “That sparked my curiosity about currency markets,” she says. “A few years later at university, my finance lecturer

was a portfolio manager. She made financial markets come to life, particularly the market reaction to the US rate hikes in 1994. Around that time, I decided that was the career I wanted to pursue.”

Many have followed in Sinead's footsteps and female representation in senior industry positions has increased. Firms have recognized that diverse perspectives lead to better investment decisions, which ultimately drives better performance and fuels their growth, according to Sinead. Firms are also positioning themselves to better understand an evolving client base, prompted by the expectation that by 2030, women in the U.S. will control a much greater share of the $30 trillion changing hands from baby boomers to younger generations.

“Without a doubt, there has been significant progress,” she says. “However, more progress is needed, particularly in investment roles.”

To Sinead's point, only 12.5% of mutual funds in 2022 had at least one female portfolio manager, according to Morningstar. Similarly, Bloomberg research from 2020 revealed that fewer than 8% of senior investment roles within private equity are held by women.

Female mentorship is a recurring theme throughout her career. She currently works with formal and informal industry networks, as well as her alma mater in Ireland, to attract more women to the industry while ensuring those who are interested understand the range of career options available to them.

Diversity of thought

Sinead believes investors should have a global view. Knowledge of other economies and markets is not only essential to understanding one’s own investment landscape, but it helps form a comprehensive investment thesis that takes all factors into account.

“While the global economy has become more synchronized in the past couple of decades, there is still tremendous variation across individual economies due to idiosyncratic factors, including regulation. In addition, geopolitical tensions are ever present,” she says.

“Understanding how perspectives and decision calibration may differ in other countries or regions is critically important to making the right investment decision.”

Deborah Bannon, BNY Mellon Investment Management’s head of institutional sales APAC ex-Japan and consultant relations for the Asia-Pacific region, reflects on the growth of diversity within the asset management business.

Deborah originally worked her way up in the competitive, then largely male-oriented, City of London insurance business of the 1990s before a search for new challenges and broader horizons saw her switch to Hong Kong to tackle Asian prospects. While she worked initially in the regional insurance sector, she became more interested in investment management and studied to earn post-graduate qualifications to help secure a position in the business.

In an evolving market, one of the biggest shifts Deborah has seen during her time in Asia has been growing diversity in investment management centers like Hong Kong and Singapore. This is particularly noticeable in the recruitment and involvement of female staff across the industry. “Just two decades ago it was rare to see women in investment management jobs, but there has been a massive shift towards bringing more women into investing.”

"Whether that is in sales or portfolio management, we are now seeing increasing diversity and inclusiveness across the fund management business. This growth in inclusiveness has been a substantial change and, in my view, represents real progress,” she says.

It is important we nurture and demonstrate real diversity of thought. This comes not just from hiring more women but also working with a broader mix of people from different backgrounds. Building a diverse workforce should not be a box-ticking exercise or simply relying on quotas but should instead ensure that all individuals feel their perspective is valued and that they have a voice at the table.

Deborah Bannon

While welcoming this change, Deborah believes the investment management industry still has some way to go to become fully inclusive. One area of concern for Deborah is the way she believes women are often overlooked as a target market by investment firms, including many asset managers in Asia-Pacific.

“Looking at advertising billboards in Asia and even more globally, it doesn’t take much imagination to see investment firms tend to target their products at men. Their campaigns often use high risk metaphors and language that women cannot really relate to – mainly because this imagery and messaging doesn’t necessarily tie into their motivations or longer-term goals.

“As a company we are giving a lot of time and thought to this but as an industry there is still a long way to go in improving financial education

and having more visible female role models. Cultivating a more inclusive culture in the industry will, I believe, be fundamental in attracting more women to the investment industry over time,” she concludes.