As we get ready to celebrate International Women’s Day, we are thrilled to have snatched some time with the legendary Laura Langton of J M Finn, who in January completed the World’s Toughest Row with her team The Ace of Blades.  The team rowed over 3000 miles across the Atlantic in 47 days and their journey was brilliantly captured by their social media team on Linked IN and their Ace of Blades profile page. https://www.linkedin.com/company/team-ace-of-blades/ The team raised over £80,000 for charity.

Elizabeth Browne is Managing Director and Co-Head, Elevate at GCM Grosvenor, where she works in the Sponsor Solutions division. She was previously Head of Entrepreneurship and Family Office Partners at RedBird Capital Partners and was a senior member of the investment team at DNS capital, a family office. She has held numerous board roles.

Claudia Buffini is Corporate Responsibility Advisor to the Chief of Staff at Schroders. In this role she supports Schroders on delivering its purpose –whilst being a sustainable business, addressing The Sustainable Development Goal 10, ‘Promoting Equalities’. She previously worked as a communications consultant in the branding industry to help companies articulate their values and purpose to both internal and external stakeholders. Her prior roles include a royal charity, a global workforce operating in an Iraqi oil field and a branding agency.

Sara Bonesteel is Chief Investment Officer- International Insurance at Prudential Financial, located in the NYC area.  She was previously a managing director in Bear Stearns and JP Morgan. She is an Independent Director of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC and holds a number of other Board and Investment Committee Roles.

It is hard to believe that we are back for our fourth year of the Fiftyfaces Podcast – and in Series 1 of 2023 we hear about unorthodox beginnings such as the twelve year old who arbitraged the price of chickens when growing up in Uganda, and ended up in a senior role in Bridgewater before starting his own firm. We hear about traditional ones too, about investment instincts honed at the family dinner table, or through seeing the world through an artist’s eyes. 

Jonathan Hollow is a writer and commentator on consumer education and protection.  His recent book, How to Fund the Life you Want, distills learning on financial education and evidence-based investing into a manual for pensions and investing.  He is a charity trustee and also doing a part time MA in Ancient History.  His former roles include leadership positions in the Money Advice Service and Money and Pensions Service.

James Brooke Turner is Director of Yoke and Co and Investment Director of the Nuffield Foundation. He was voted one of the inaugural four Inspiring Leaders in the Voluntary Sector and writes about financial governance for charities. Our conversation starts with his study of art history, how he found that discipline and the perspective and insight it gave him for his ultimate career in finance.

As we bring our third series and second full year of podcasting to a close we have assembled a library of over 170 diverse role models in this series.  As the macro backdrop churns these dynamic personalities are our touchstones, our human constants, through the market noise.  

In Series 5 of 2022 we hear from leaders from large institutions, a charity, a sovereign wealth fund, as well as a strategist at a global asset manager, a purveyor of inclusive capital, a partner at a consulting firm who successfully came back as a “returner”, a financial journalist and an ex navy aviator.

Jack Dodd describes himself as a human who talks about mental health. I came across him thanks to a powerful LinkedIn post he made about how boys get sad too, in which he called to normalize expressing emotion, sometimes at work