Speakers

Helen Shay, Non-Executive Director, Universities Superannuation Scheme Ltd

Helen Shay is a non-executive director with Universities Superannuation Scheme Ltd, the UK’s largest private pension fund with c£70bn assets. The fund is increasingly looking to ESG and impact investment for returns, and currently has c£1.9bn in Clean Energy (Solar and Photovoltaic). It also seeks to use its position as a shareholder, where appropriate, to influence investee companies on ESG aspects.

Helen is a solicitor whose legal career has spanned private practice and in-house roles across sectors, including retail (with Next plc) and financial services (with Financial Ombudsman Service and Skipton Building Society). She was General In-house Counsel at the University of York for over twelve years, before joining the USS board in 2020, where she also serves on Audit and Risk Committee. Her work with USS involves stakeholder liaison and pension valuation as well as investment, linking with her interest in environmental and social issues.

Helen is also a charity trustee, previously with a homeless project and currently with an organisation providing services to those with learning difficulties and with ADS, delivering services for alcohol and drug dependency. She is also a Social Mobility Ambassador for the Law Society, assisting students from non-traditional backgrounds like ethnic minorities and lower socio-economic groups to enter the legal profession.

David Brown, Director and Training Lead, Pensions for Purpose, Independent Professional Trustee

David has worked in the pension and financial services industry for over 35 years with UK and international experience. As well as being Director and Training Lead at Pensions for Purpose he is an accredited professional pension Trustee. His Trustee appointments include schemes with FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 sponsors and with the Smart Pension Master Trust. He has broad investment, risk management and operational experience across both defined benefit and defined contribution schemes.

David has a particular interest in ESG and climate change, and holds the CFA certificate in ESG Investing. He is also a Fellow of the Pensions Management Institute.

David's prior experience includes senior management roles with Tesco, where he was UK and ROI Head of Pensions and Payroll Manager, professional service firms including Deloitte and KPMG, and Fidelity Investments in the US.

Charlotte O'Leary, Lead, Global Impact Forum, Pensions for Purpose

Charlotte, as CEO and an executive director of Pensions for Purpose, oversees the running of the business and develops the growth and innovation strategy and looks for opportunities to build partnerships to achieve Pensions for Purpose's mission.

Charlotte is also a member of the Impact Investing Institute's Pensions Expert Panel, an ambassador for the Transparency Taskforce and a founder of 10 Billion World, an end-to-end sustainability project management business aimed at businesses and organisations setting net-zero and carbon reduction targets.

Through her roles, Charlotte has built a knowledge and passion for sustainable investing. She has demonstrated this in co-authoring a paper with the Society for Pension Professionals on social impact investing and speaking on topics such as fee and service transparency at PLSA and Transparency Taskforce events. Charlotte played a critical role in developing the Impact Investing Institute's Impact Investing Principles for Pensions and led the launch of Pensions for Purpose's Global Impact Forum (formally the Impact Investing Adopters Forum).

Breakout room hosts

Tim Manuel, Partner, Co-Head of Responsible Investment, Aon

Tim Manuel is the Head of Responsible Investment and leads Aon's 20-strong specialist team, which sits at the centre of Responsible Investment expertise across our asset allocation, manager research, investment consulting and fiduciary management teams.

Tim is chair of Aon's UK Responsible Investment Committee and a regular contributor to the media, industry research and initiatives designed to advance responsible investment best practice. Tim has a wide range of experience of working with trustee and corporate clients on all sorts of investment, pensions and sustainability issues.

Simon Males, Executive Director and Head of UK Institutional Business, Tikehau Capital 

Simon Males is Executive Director and Head of UK Institutional Business at Tikehau Capital, the €38.8bn global alternative asset management group. Simon has over three decades’ experience working within the UK institutional market, including leadership roles at global asset management firms such as Legal & General Investment Management, PGIM, Pictet Asset Management and F&C (BMO).

More recently, he founded Carrick Roads Capital Limited, an institutional consulting and capital-raising firm. Simon is a member of the Board of AIMSE Europe and has previously been a member of its Advisory Council since 2013. He is also a serving Trustee and Board Director of two UK Charities (North London Hospice and The Pemberton-Barnes Trust) and has previously served as a Trustee of a £130m UK Defined Benefit corporate pension plan. Simon holds an MBA from London Metropolitan University and several Professional Qualifications, including the IMC.

Cyprian Njamma, Executive Director in the Multi-Asset Solutions (MAS), Goldman Sachs Asset Management

Cyprian Njamma is an Executive Director in the Multi-Asset Solutions (MAS) Group, with over 17 years' experience working with institutional clients, predominately UK pension schemes. He is a lead portfolio manager for outsourced and fiduciary managed multi-asset class portfolios for European institutional clients. Prior to joining the firm, Cyprian was a Director of Client Strategy at SEI Investments (Europe) Ltd where he focused on providing investment advice and strategy to institutional clients.

He was also a Trustee Director of SEI's £2bn DC Master Trust. Before joining SEI, Cyprian spent the first five years of his career at both Mercer and Aon.

At Mercer, he was an investment consultant, providing strategic investment advice for pensions schemes and at Aon, he was an Associate Consultant carrying out pension liabilities calculations. Cyprian is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and received a Masters in Actuarial Finance from Imperial College and a Masters in Physics from University of Oxford.

Global Impact Forum

The Global Impact Forum is an industry-wide member forum hosted by Pensions for Purpose to facilitate meaningful industry discussions on how to embed social and environmental impacts at a strategic level, including in governance discussions, to encourage the flow of capital towards investments that have a positive impact. For more information, please email the Forum Lead.

Pensions for Purpose