We are delighted to bring you this special conversation with John Harney who is a former guest on the show and a prominent writer and thinker on pensions as well as career and wellness topics. Our conversation picks up with where we left off - John's former discussion on the podcast in which he described his unconventional career journey as well as a love of baking, nurtured during Covid.

We move then to discuss the evolution of John's current thinking on pensions - how pensions should form part of the holistic risk discussion that all companies hold, and further how the the structure of ultimate responsibility resting with the trustees while major functions are outsourced is an important distinctive feature. This unconventional lens holds a host of opportunities for re-thinking how we see pensions and we discuss the evolution of John's role within AON and the kind of opportunities that he is seeing on the road.

You can find John's previous podcast here.

This podcast is kindly sponsored by Benefit Street Partners and PIMCO. Founded in 2008, Benefit Street Partners – BSP – is Franklin Templeton’s specialised private credit manager with $92 billion in assets under management.

The firm provides a wide range of private credit strategies across the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific, including direct lending, special situations, commercial real estate debt, infrastructure debt, asset backed finance, structured credit and liquid credit.

PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company LLC) is a premier global investment management firm founded in 1971, specializing in active fixed-income with over $2 trillion in assets under management. Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, it offers diversified investment solutions across public and private markets, serving institutional and individual investors worldwide.

We are thrilled to launch Series 2 of the 2026 Fiftyfaces Podcast with a bumper collection of guests featuring three senior professionals at UK LGPS pools - Richard Tomlinson (CIO at LPPI), Richard Law-Deeks (CEO at LGPS Central) and Ryan Boothroyd (Head of External Management at Border to Coast). We also feature titan of the industry Michael Davis of T Rowe Price on the cusp of his retirement from heading up retirement solutions there and he reflects on that decades in the industry taught him about client relationships and trust.

We hear from an experienced venture professional (Carol Strobel of Antler) about the venture environment in Brazil and why some boards need a reboot, while John Harney of AON reboots our thinking about pensions - again. Ami Galani of TIPT ventures describes her move from industry and Dick's Sporting Goods into running her own venture firm and the potential in women's sports, while Alex Ambroz founder of the Allocator Training Institute discusses his background in foster care and the US army and how this formed his work ethic and his approach to investing. Lin Yue discusses her upbringing in China and how she learned to seek to build a new table and not just find a place at an existing one, while Jennifer Marques of Oaktree discusses the burgeoning world of private credit as well as discussing a personal hardship that shaped her approach to resilience.

This podcast series is kindly sponsored by Benefit Street Partners and PIMCO. Founded in 2008, Benefit Street Partners – BSP – is Franklin Templeton’s specialised private credit manager with $92 billion in assets under management.

The firm provides a wide range of private credit strategies across the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific, including direct lending, special situations, commercial real estate debt, infrastructure debt, asset backed finance, structured credit and liquid credit.

PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company LLC) is a premier global investment management firm founded in 1971, specializing in active fixed-income with over $2 trillion in assets under management. Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, it offers diversified investment solutions across public and private markets, serving institutional and individual investors worldwide.

Alex Ambroz is CEO of the Allocator Training Institute, which grew out of a career-long observation of the gap in the market for the kind of training that allocators need. Our podcast discussion starts with his own upbringing and he describes how he grew up in foster care and moved around a lot during his childhood in the US North East. The US Army was then a natural place to find his bearings given his lack of family supports and he went from there into university from where his career in finance began.

Alex discusses how he found his role at Morgan Creek Capital Management and the range of skills and mentorship that he had access to there. We move then to discuss his investment beliefs and Alex highlighted the "Ferrari effect" and "fake alpha," stressing the need for systematic evaluation of factor exposures. He also introduced a novel emerging managers program involving a structured three-year investment bake-off.

Alex is currently based in Ireland and we discuss what brought him there, his role in Aberdeen Investments Ireland and what drove him to create the Allocator Training Institute and the vision behind it. We discuss the value of networks, continuous learning, and the importance of getting stakeholder buy-in for successful change management.

This podcast is kindly sponsored by Benefit Street Partners and PIMCO. Founded in 2008, Benefit Street Partners – BSP – is Franklin Templeton’s specialised private credit manager with $92 billion in assets under management.

The firm provides a wide range of private credit strategies across the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia Pacific, including direct lending, special situations, commercial real estate debt, infrastructure debt, asset backed finance, structured credit and liquid credit.

PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company LLC) is a premier global investment management firm founded in 1971, specializing in active fixed-income with over $2 trillion in assets under management. Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, it offers diversified investment solutions across public and private markets, serving institutional and individual investors worldwide.