(mis)Conduct, Money & Reputation Lansons & Katten

From trawling The Eighth Day shop on Manchester’s Oxford Road in a long black cloak and dress to chairing the UK’s largest in-house pension asset manager at USS via one of the first graduate trainee schemes for stockbrokers, Sarah Bates has a long, storied and hugely successful career in the City and beyond. She has been a fund manager, a CEO, and has chaired some of the UK’s biggest pension funds. Sarah was also one of the founders of The Diversity Project in 2015 which continues to mak...

Building a business with a diversified employee base is no longer a nice to have, its necessary, both in terms of talent retention but client retention as well. The regulator is also insisting that financial services firms put in place evidence-based diversity and inclusion strategies that take into account the individual firm's progress on these efforts. The reputational hazards are many. Reputation is mostly driven by behaviour and if you claim to building a diverse team when you aren’...

An increasingly diverse regulatory landscape presents substantial reputational challenges for investment managers.Amid the shifting ESG terrain at the heart of financial services, investment firms are recalibrating their approach to sustainability, grappling with the balance between upholding ESG principles and avoiding regulatory pitfalls. If you're managing ESG related funds, you could now be fired by some of the very largest pension funds in the U.S. Asset managers need to navigate an...

ESG, and specifically sustainability, is an increasingly controversial topic for investment managers, with diverging regulation in Europe, the US and UK, and rising numbers of reputational hazards to navigate. Many fund companies are removing phrases like “ESG” and “sustainable” from product names, whilst downgrading the obligations that these funds have to the principles of ESG. At the same time, it seems that many investment businesses have been overstating their sustainability ...

Back in early June, it looked like we were set for a balmy summer, but then the storm broke. A Financial Times and Tortoise Media investigative feature in the FT Weekend magazine detailing a series of allegations of sexual misconduct by the eponymous hedge fund founder at Odey Asset Management set off a chain of events that will have far-reaching consequences for financial services businesses.This is a story which is defining the sector’s image in the public eye. But what are the underlying l...