What are the challenges of growth? What are opportunities? What if you get to create a client advisory function from scratch? Where would you start?

In this special bonus episode - one of five that we will be launching every Friday for the next four weeks - is part of a special collaboration with Always a Pensions Angle Podcast by DG publishing. A few months ago at a conference hosted by DB Publishing I sat down with five leaders across the LGPS to capture their thoughts on the current state of transition among the asset pools.

Trevor is a friend and long term contact of mine on the LGPS circuit. We first worked together at Lancashire County Pension Fund over 10 years ago, were co-advisers at South Yorkshire Pensions Authority and I'm now so pleased to see his success at LGPS Central, where he is Chief Client & Advisory Officer.

Trevor has extensive LGPS and broader investment management experience and has worked as an investment consultant recognised as a leading expert in private market investment. Trevor has been a member of the LGPS community since working as Deputy CIO at Lancashire County Pension Fund (LCPF) and then Deputy CIO and Investment Director for Private Credit at LGPS pooling entity LPPI.

In this podcast we dig in to what it means to create a client advisory role, ask about whether there is any conflict inherent in being both client and shareholder, on the part of the Administering Authorities and discuss the importance of applying internal rigour.

Lin Yue, previously led the strategic trustees business at Goldman Sachs Asset Management in London where she was responsible for key relationships in the UK institutional market. She has been recognized in the HERoes 100 Women Future Leaders by Yahoo Finance for three consecutive years and a finalist as Asian Women of Achievement Award.

Our conversation covers her life journey from China through to finance in London, and we cite the wonderful LinkedIn post part of This Little Girl is Me campaign in which she chronicles the serendipitous road that this took. We speak in particular about taking up space as a woman in finance, and how, initially she thought that she had to conform in order to find her voice at the table - Lin then realised that another approach might be to build a new table at which she could be her authentic self.

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 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.

Jennifer Marques is Head of Strategy and Structuring for Structured Credit and Asset-Backed Finance at Oaktree, based in Los Angeles. She started her career as a corporate lawyer, first in private practice and then within Oaktree. She discussed her career journey from law to finance, emphasizing the importance of resilience.

She highlights Oaktree's focus on asset-backed finance, which involves lending to lenders, and its strategic partnership with Brookfield. She discusses in particular the recent SAAS-pocalyse and why it has affected certain areas more than others. Marques noted the evolving role of banks in asset-backed finance and the opportunities for private alternative lenders like Oaktree.

Turning to personal reflections She also shared her personal resilience after losing her home in the 2025 LA wildfires, underscoring the importance of community support. Marquez advised taking risks, providing solutions, and remaining calm in crises.

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.

Adam Blitz is CEO and Co-CIO at Evanston Capital, where he has spent 24 years. He previously worked as a trader at AQR and in the prime brokerage division at Goldman Sachs. Our conversation starts with the serendipitous turn that saw Adam move from the prime brokerage division into the very early days of Evanston capital at the heyday of hedge funds going mainstream. We speak about the risk that that involved, and the vision of expanding upon the endowment investing model that had been in place at NorthWestern University in Illinois.

We move then into what has made Evanston’s approach to hedge fund investing stand the test of time – such as a continuing commitment to uncovering fresh talent in smaller, more nimble funds. Adam discusses the importance of “polish” in a manager’s presentation style, and how sometimes it is necessary to see through that to assess the true edge that a manager may have.

We examine the role of hedge funds in a portfolio and how that has evolved over time and I cite the notable transparency that has always characterized Evanston’s approach, and we discuss the merits of that.

This podcast is kindly sponsored by Evanston Capital and Alvine Capital. For over 20 years Evanston Capital has had a key focus in identifying early-stage investment managers it believes are capable of generating long-term, value-added returns in complex, innovative strategy areas. Alvine Capital is a specialist investment manager and placement boutique with a particular focus on alternative assets with significant presence in London and Stockholm.

Matthew Rice is Chief Investment Officer of Vistamark Investments LLC where he leads the creation and execution of innovative, research-driven investment strategies anchored in disciplined portfolio management .He launched the firm in June of 2025 after a long career at Fiducient Advsors.

Our conversation starts with his career as a college and then professional athlete and the way that this experience shaped him in terms of resilience and teamwork. We move then to his continued formative years in investment consulting at the firm that was then DiMeo Schneider and follow this with what led him to launch Vistamark.

Matt emphasized the importance of qualitative analysis alongside quantitative models and shared his approach to maximizing return at a given risk budget. He also discussed the challenges of mission-driven investing, such as removing fossil fuels from portfolios. His final advice is around the importance of being honest, hardworking, and true to oneself as an investor.

This podcast is kindly sponsored by Evanston Capital and Alvine Capital. For over 20 years Evanston Capital has had a key focus in identifying early-stage investment managers it believes are capable of generating long-term, value-added returns in complex, innovative strategy areas. Alvine Capital is a specialist investment manager and placement boutique with a particular focus on alternative assets with significant presence in London and Stockholm.