Rebecca Heun is Managing Director of Aksia LLC where she heads their Operational Due Diligence function. She has spent 18 years at Aksia and prior to that held a series of other financial roles. We met during a recent trip to Omaha, and what followed was a fascinating fresh look at the process of operational due diligence as well as a deep dive into financial sector start up life.

Tom Raber is the founder and Managing Director of London-based Alvine Capital, a reverse enquiry solutions firm that Tom founded in 2005, with a particular focus on finding solutions for institutional investors in alternative assets.  Originally from Sweden, he previously held leadership roles at Key Asset Management  and a series of investment banks. 

Are we slipping in our intellectual abilities? Have we lost the ability to read, reason, analyze, and more importantly pay attention?

Over the past decade we have seen a deluge of challenges – from Covid and its disruptive effect on education, to the rising use of screens and smart phones to the more recent threat from LLMs and an increasingly proficient set of AI tools that threaten to compete with and ultimately replace humans in almost every dimension. Each of these threats is nuanced and subjective, but we are starting to see patterns emerge in terms of the impact  on our attention span, and ability to think critically and absorb new information.

Carol Geremia is president of MFS Investment Management® (MFS®) and head of Global Distribution. She leads the firm’s worldwide client-facing teams as well as product and marketing strategy. Since joining MFS in 1984, Carol has held roles focused primarily on fiduciary responsibility, stewardship and sustainability, and she has actively engaged with clients at all levels to ensure that the firm builds products and services aligned with their needs. Carol is a member of the Investment Company Institute’s Board of Governors, the City Year Seven Generations Board, the MFS Charitable Oversight Committee and as an Advisory Council member for Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Inc.

Varun Laijawalla is a Portfolio Manager at Ninety One, where he manages long only EM and EM ex-China portfolios.  He started his career as a consultant and moved into stockpicking via Asia focused sales.

In this bonus episode we meet with fellow INSEAD alumna Avivah Wittenberg-Cox advocates for new thinking in generational and gender balance. She is a consultant, coach and speaker on the rising impact of longevity on the people and on the workplace and provides advice to help businesses thrive. She is the author of seven books on gender, leadership and longevity and the host of the podcast 4-Quarter lives, where she applauds podcasts as a way to create “real conversations in a very noisy world”.  

Bruno Kaiser is CFO at Smile CDR Incl, a digital health company based in Toronto. He previously spent over 20 years in a series of investment banking leadership roles with a particular focus on the Metals and Mining Sector. We were classmates at INSEAD from 1999-2000.   

Bruno Kaiser is CFO at Smile CDR Incl, a digital health company based in Toronto. He previously spent over 20 years in a series of investment banking leadership roles with a particular focus on the Metals and Mining Sector. We were classmates at INSEAD from 1999-2000.   

Matteo Dante Puccio, is President International  and a Partner at Wave Financial Group. He’s had an extensive career across the wealth management, VC tech investing and family office space. He’s currently focused on digital assets at Wave Financial Group.

Hardeep Rai is Group Chief Executive Officer at The Kaleidoscope Group of Companies, which enable disabled individuals to realize their full potential and find their purpose by enabling them to learn new skills, find their dream job or start their own business.  Kaleidoscope Investments invests in disabled individuals with great ideas enabling them to launch their own businesses.   Hardeep is a prominent advocate for the rights of disabled people, particularly in the City of London network, and is driven by an agenda of social impact and inclusion.