Round up!

At City Hive, we never stop talking about how to bring cultural change to the industry. We continue creating opportunities to raise the profile of our corporate members that Stand With Us.

In recent months this has included speaking on key issues including the importance of culture, diversity and inclusion in our industry, BAME issues (and our issues with blanket terminology, neurodiversity, governance and looking forward to the regulatory landscape and changes that may come upon us.

Not afraid to confront challenging topics, we curated an evening conversation on International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination – a frank discussion of what people of colour really talk about when no one is listening in, to shine a light on daily experiences.

We held our exclusive event where we interviewed senior talent from our Founding Members, to talk about their very different journeys and experiences that brought them to our industry. We joined Brooks Macdonald at their offices to talk to their global staff about culture, inclusion and belonging.

You may have seen Bev Shah interviewed on BBC1’s Panorama about the importance of culture, especially in the wake of the Woodford scandal that the programme focused on, causing a stir on social media amid the realisation that most news stories about our industry are not positive. And with characteristic early morning energy, Bev also became a fixture on BBC Breakfast Briefing, brightening up the Brexit-heavy news.

We enjoyed challenging tired perspectives with calls to action on panels at Citywire Wealth Manager, Aberdeen Standard, Vanguard, Credit Suisse, M&G Prudential, the Prince’s Trust, MHP, Refinitiv Lipper Fund Selector Forum, Money Marketing Conference, Regulations and Compliance Summit, European Sustainable Investment Conference - to name a few.

We’ve also had the honour to judge the Women in Investment Awards and Portfolio Adviser Wealth Adviser Awards, Financial News Asset Management Awards, We Are the City Rising Star Awards and the Princes Trust Enterprise Challenge. We were shortlisted for a PRI award for our Treasury-commissioned research into a Women in Finance charter in Brazil.

And underpinning are our concrete actions to support industry change. We spoke with leaders in diversity and inclusion, sales, marketing and distribution as we launched our City Stars programme to support mid-career talent, and to lay the ground work for our innovative industry Mentoring programme.  We met with the Bank of England, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Treasury to discuss industry issues and pathways to change. We issued a report on the gender pay gap in our industry – with calls to redress the imbalance.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes we have been preparing to revitalise the Ethnicity workstream at the Diversity Project. We are working on a study that will examine the UK’s 40% gender pension gap and what our industry can do as people change the way they save and invest.

And we didn’t forget to have fun – amid the awards dinners we onboarded our newest recruit, Scout, and we are preparing for our annual International Men’s Day Quiz.