Kurtosys Spotlight: Most impactful women, Anji Stewart, TV marketing

This week’s edition of Kurtosys Spotlight features Anji Stewart, an advanced sustainable investing handbook, a global retirement infographic, TV spots, comics, and the most impactful women in fintech and beyond, 2019.

Digital Leader Spotlight: Anji Stewart, Managing Director, Head of EMEA Marketing at Wellington Management

With over 15 years of experience in the financial sector, and covering roles from Customer Relations to Business Development, Anji Stewart is a skilled strategist with advanced knowledge of digital marketing tools.

Since working at RAB Capital, Anji has handled CRM databases and organized the integration of many CRM systems following acquisitions. Further developments in Anji’s career have led to management roles making her responsible for implementing a marketing strategy for all distribution channels across Europe, including the management of literature and updating websites, as well as maintaining relationships with investors, family offices and institutions. The relationship aspect of a fund marketer is phenomenally improved through use of digital.

Anji has now been at Wellington Management for over 4 years, and the Head of EMEA Marketing for half of that time, making her a renowned leader in digital marketing industry-wide.

Anji is part of our Most Influential Digital Leaders in Asset Management gallery, which we have recently updated. Check it out!

Featured White Paper: Sustainable Investing Handbook

Brace yourselves for this one, as this week in the white paper section we’re going all out with a bumper edition of some of the more academic writings we’ve included at the Spotlight.

ESG considerations are an extremely hot topic, and contained within that bracket is sustainable investing: how investors are looking to place money into companies that are featured for their responsible investment strategies, in the hope that it will lead to the development of sustainable products, services and processes. The paper is a joint effort between Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), the MSCI, UBS Asset Management and UBS ETFs.

The paper starts with an introduction on the emergence of sustainable investing (SI) becoming a necessity rather than a commodity seen as simply, in their words, “nice-to-have” and discusses how UBS has had a long standing legacy of SI going back twenty years or so, with firms supported by the UN-backed PRI.

Following this, the PRI outlines some more data-centric research including the rise in AUM which cover responsible investing activities and the number of signatories for the PRI by end of April 2018.

After this, the MSCI and UBS Asset Management offer a whole wealth of essays looking into such topics as integrating ESG into factor strategies and active portfolios, corporate controversies, the implementation of socially conscious ETFs as well as a case study and an analysis of three ESG-ranked equity portfolios.

There really is a large amount of information to sink your teeth into, but all segmented by essay topic to help you navigate to sections that are most pertinent.

You can find this document via Savvy Investor.

Featured Infographic: Visualizing Global Attitudes Towards Retirement

Focusing our gaze once more on the retirement space, the infographic creators at Visual Capitalist have chosen to craft a large-scale holistic view of the varying attitudes towards retirement country to country, in conjunction with Raconteur.

The centrepiece of this impressively pink graphic is a large wheel identifying the incomes of different populations, taken from a Schroders survey of 22,000 people from 30 countries, which is stored below the infographic itself in a table. This further identifies each of the 30 countries’ retirement income expectation (as a percentage of salary), the actual income and the difference in these percentages.

These are all displayed spider-like around the central web of the infographic to highlight, rather interestingly, that Poland is the country with the largest difference between actual and expected incomes. In Europe, Portugal had the lowest difference and the US, UK and China were all featured around the middle-point mark. India was an exception to the rule whereby the actual retirement salary exceeded the expectation of those surveyed – a full 96% of their salary. Austria, Portugal and Taiwan were similar in this regard.

That’s not to say that retirement is the be all and end all of income, however, and also displayed is which countries contained the employees that were most likely to keep earning money past their retirement. The highest percentages came from the US, Italy and Australia (all at 59%), whereas the Netherlands seemed the most reluctant to continue work beyond retiring age at 32%.

We also all love to think about what we’d expect to do post-retirement. Some will take a very long and well deserved holiday, whereas others would, say, learn a new instrument or language. Rather non-surprisingly, there was a low percentage of those that wanted to keep working in the same field (16%), another field (13%), or attempt to start up a new business venture (a very low 10%). The clear majority wish to travel (60%), or spend more time with friends and family (57%), whilst volunteering and the undertaking of a new hobby were also popular pursuits.

Plenty of excellent insights into how countries’ monetary attitudes differ so vastly, do check it out over at the Visual Capitalist website for the full image and rundown, with a brief look into the future of how retirement reality will change per generation, highlighted by the incoming “sandwich generation” supporting both retired parents and own children alike.

Video in Focus: TV Spots

We’ve been discussing the various ways that investment firms, banks and fintechs are investing plenty of money into video content. Whether that be in-house interview styles or otherwise, video content is an excellent game changer that we all love to see, and more and more we’re witnessing clips that are showing up, not just on digital channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter etc, but also on television sets.

Fans of the box may recently have become aware of the new television spot from the far-from-fledgling neobank that’s been making a lot of waves in the fintech space recently. Starling Bank has quickly established itself as a forerunner in the UK’s digital bank market, joining the likes of Monzo who also produced an advert for the small screen to establish itself as a ‘household name’ in an excellently marketed way.

For those of you without a TV screen right by you, there’s thankfully an all-digital video which you can see below, featuring the trademark ‘bird’ imagery in a beautifully shot piece that’s sure to get the public talking about digital finance all the more: