The second is that this year’s rising stars are younger on average — there are six under the age of 30, instead of just one or two. Both these trends reflect the entries&nbsp;FN&nbsp;received. Historically, across its lists of rising stars&nbsp;FN&nbsp;has struggled to boost female representation, with most nominations received being for men. This year, the entries were roughly 50/50. A fifth of the rising stars have specific ESG roles, whereas five years ago it was barely mentioned, and nearly all the nominations cite it as a central part of the young professionals’ jobs.

Abrams - Fehling

Despite having early ambitions of becoming a rock star — he even made it as far as releasing his own album — these days Joe Abrams is making his mark in finance instead. He heads the European private debt team at Mercer and has recently led the development of a new strategy, PIP VI Credit Opportunities, which held its final close in December last year. Abrams has grown his team to&nbsp;10 people globally and is set to expand it further. He has also played a key role in&nbsp;winning new clients, including a large family office. He joined Mercer in 2010 from Orchard Wealth Management, where he was part of a team managing an equity portfolio. His professional successes aside, Abrams sees juggling a busy work schedule with being a father to three children as his greatest accomplishment. He says both his current and prior bosses have motivated him in his professional career and have made sure to always challenge his&nbsp;viewpoint&nbsp;and push him to achieve.

Head of private debt, Europe

Megan Brennan’s childhood ambition was to become an investigative journalist, but after studying economics at university, she did an internship at an accounting business and then discovered her interest in portfolio management. Today, Brennan is a manager for three multi-asset funds at Sarasin, which she joined in 2017, where she keeps a watchful eye on the impact of the macroeconomic climate and geopolitical risks on asset allocation. She cites creating and being lead manager of Sarasin’s Tomorrow’s World Fund at the age of just 30 as one of her greatest achievements. The fund invests in sustainable companies and in bonds that support social and economic development. Brennan credits private bank and&nbsp;wealth manager Coutts with giving her opportunities in her early career, having joined its graduate trainee programme, and attributes her current position to it. She says that as a result of her experiences, she is now passionate about mentoring others. She&nbsp;is also committed to ESG investing and wants to influence the agenda — she works with the media to&nbsp;raise&nbsp;awareness about sustainability issues.

Portfolio manager

Thibaud Clisson is climate change lead at BNP Paribas Asset Management’s Sustainability Centre and leads the fund manager’s thinking on energy transition. He&nbsp;is a senior ESG analyst responsible for the utilities, materials and energy sectors and manages shareholder engagement with corporates in these sectors. Clisson has also been a leading figure in the development of BNPP AM’s road map to net zero, and is the thought leader behind its methodology and commitments. Other recent achievements include his contribution to the development of BNPP AM’s coal policy and its methodology for measuring and reporting carbon footprint. Outside BNPP AM, Clisson sits on various committees, such as the technical advisory group of the Transition Pathway Initiative, which brings together asset owners to assess how prepared companies are for the transition to a low-carbon economy. In the future, Clisson wants to concentrate his ESG efforts at BNPP AM on private investments, especially private equity and venture capital.

Climate change lead

A love of maths and an entrepreneurial spirit she says&nbsp;she inherited from her father took Georgina Cooper on a path into fund management. She joined Abrdn in 2014 and is now an associate portfolio manager at Newton Investment Management. Cooper joined Newton — one of eight investment firms that form BNY Mellon Investment Management — at the&nbsp;start of 2022 as part of the UK equities team. She co-manages the £606m BNY Mellon UK Equity fund and the £213m&nbsp;BNY Mellon Sustainable UK Opportunities fund. Over the next two to three years, Cooper wants&nbsp;to continue scaling and building out the Sustainable UK Opportunities fund. In the longer term, she sees a gap in part of the mid-cap market and would like to create her own fund. Cooper has&nbsp;been instrumental in hiring Newton IM’s graduate research analysts, who are set to join the firm in September. She hopes one day to be seen as a&nbsp;role model to younger professionals in the industry.&nbsp;

Associate portfolio manager, UK equities

As a teenager, Vera Fehling was fascinated by market charts and wanted to work at the stock exchange. The career path she has chosen certainly offers ample opportunity to analyse market data. Fehling is the senior portfolio manager and team lead for liability-driven investment within German asset manager DWS’s multi-asset and solutions group. There she oversees €12bn in assets under management and a&nbsp;further €45bn&nbsp;in notional assets. Clients range from&nbsp;domestic small caps to multinational large caps, including German pension funds. Fehling worked at Commerzbank and BHF-Bank before joining DWS in 2011. She moved to the LDI business at the fund manager two&nbsp;years later, taking on portfolio responsibility for large pension funds and&nbsp;winning new mandates. She was promoted&nbsp;to&nbsp;team lead in&nbsp;February 2021, overseeing four people. She&nbsp;also&nbsp;takes an active role in DWS Group’s mentorship programmes, helping new&nbsp;employees.

Team lead for liability-driven investment, multi-asset and solutions

Fitzpatrick - Johnson

Lucy Fitzpatrick joined Cardano as a graduate in 2018 and has quickly moved up the ranks, gaining a promotion to senior analyst in January 2021 and to client manager earlier this year. At school, she wanted to work in fashion, but her economics teacher changed her mind and she studied economics and politics at university. Within the client management team Fitzpatrick is lead adviser on two of the biggest defined benefit pension schemes in the UK, both of which have £3bn under management. Fitzpatrick also works in fiduciary management, recently overseeing the onboarding process for a new circa-£1bn client. Her proudest achievement is her role in the development of Cardano’s structured graduate programme, where she takes the lead in mentoring and training new recruits and driving the firm’s diversity initiatives. She currently manages an intern from the 10,000 Black Interns programme, which started off as an initiative in the asset management sector and now spans several other industries.

Client manager

Katie Frame leads Schroders’ engagement strategy on social issues such as human capital, human rights, and diversity and inclusion. One of her greatest achievements has been leading the development of Schroders’ Engagement Blueprint, the first of its kind for the firm, setting out its global strategy and key engagement themes. Last year, Frame also led Schroders’ campaign to take action against all-white boards in the UK, sending letters to chairs of FTSE 100 companies. This led to further engagement with 20% of those organisations and four companies have since appointed their first non-white non-executive director. This year, she is leading ongoing engagements with Amazon on workers’ rights issues as well as with Alphabet and Meta on digital rights. Frame joined Schroders last year from Federated Hermes International’s engagement team. She began her career working on sustainability and engagement at Samsung Electronics, having joined as part of its graduate trainee programme.

Active ownership manager

Alastair Greenlees was promoted to co-head of UK investment strategy at Kempen in February, sharing responsibility for managing £6.1bn in assets across the firm’s 21 UK fiduciary management clients and helping the business win six new mandates in the past 12 months. Greenlees, whose work has taken him from the Middle East to Canada to Bermuda, says his greatest achievement has been his role over the past six months in creating a new segment of the pensions market with consolidator Clara-Pensions, the first such entity to receive approval from the Pensions Regulator. Kempen acts as fiduciary manager for Clara-Pensions, which was set up to give funding to struggling defined benefit plans without their needing to go through a full buyout. In the near term, he hopes to see the pensions consolidation market come to fruition. He is inspired by working on and finding solutions to new problems. Greenlees also sits on Kempen’s D&amp;I Committee.

Co-head of investment strategy, UK

A career in finance always appealed to Stevie Ingamells, an interest sparked by a female maths teacher at school who urged girls to pursue maths-related occupations. A degree in economics led her into the industry and she joined Gresham House in 2018, starting as an investment analyst. Since then, she has been promoted twice and now works on sustainable infrastructure investments. Ingamells has not let the challenges of the Covid pandemic hinder making deals. In the past 18 months, she and her team have led four investments totalling £300m for the British Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, creating more than 500 jobs in the process. One of these, which was driven by a desire to promote social inclusion in rural communities, was&nbsp;a&nbsp;£51m investment in Cornwall-based fibre internet&nbsp;service&nbsp;Wildanet. Another investment is&nbsp;N Family Club, which aims to revolutionise early childhood education by putting sustainability at&nbsp;the&nbsp;core of its operations and curriculum. Ingamells worked in leveraged finance at Lloyds Banking Group before joining Gresham House. She&nbsp;believes there is still much more to do to ensure&nbsp;more investment reaches companies with ESG goals. She is also a strong advocate for diversity, which she supports through recruitment and mentoring others coming into the business.&nbsp;

Associate director, sustainable infrastructure

Tayana Johnson is responsible for developing and executing the model portfolio business — an outsourced service for financial intermediaries such as private banks and pension funds — in Emea and Asia-Pacific for State Street Global Advisors’ SPDR ETF business. She has been instrumental in the growth of the business, which is up 4% over the past 12 months to $9.6bn. Johnson also leads the firm’s Go-to-Market strategy for eight European markets, measuring performance for the model portfolio service through market research and competitive analysis. She also sits on several of the firm’s committees, including chairing the new-hire orientation committee and being involved in its committee to promote inclusion and have conversations around anti-racism. Johnson joined State Street 17 years ago, initially in Boston before moving to London in 2017. She considers her biggest achievements to be her third-degree black belt in taekwondo and hosting a panel discussion with Madeleine Albright, the first female US Secretary&nbsp;of State. Johnson has ambitions to work her&nbsp;way up to managing director level and to continue her mentoring efforts to pave the way forward for other women in the sector.&nbsp;&nbsp;

Vice-president and ETF model portfolio strategist

Laurent-Bellue - Meissner

Since joining Tikehau Capital in 2007, Maxime Laurent-Bellue has risen quickly through the ranks, carving out a reputation as a leader and receiving recognition for his entrepreneurial spirit. He launched the firm’s senior loan business in 2012, then in 2019 he&nbsp;set up a business unit dedicated to special opportunities and multi-asset mandates — the special opportunities strategy fund closed in 2021, exceeding its target by almost 15%. Laurent-Bellue considers this to be one of his proudest accomplishments and attributes his longevity at Tikehau Capital to the firm’s entrepreneurial approach. However, growing up he had very different ambitions — he wanted to be a sportsman and then decided to study geopolitics at university. But with several family members working in the financial services sector, he also harboured an interest in the industry, which led to his switching to a degree in finance. He joined Tikehau straight after graduation, initially joining its private debt team.

Head of tactical strategies

Nick Lewis has risen quickly up the ranks since joining Redington in 2014, gaining promotion to managing director (the consultant’s highest rank) at&nbsp;just 34. Now in charge of a team of 20, he leads the&nbsp;delivery of investment advice to large defined benefit pension funds. He helped win the&nbsp;firm’s appointment as strategic adviser to the Centrica Pension Scheme in February. Under his direction, Redington’s fiduciary management oversight business has grown from a&nbsp;revenue base of zero to £1m per year. He is also lead&nbsp;adviser on £20bn of client assets, with input into a&nbsp;further £80bn. Lewis always had a numerical bent, graduating from the University of Bristol in 2009 with&nbsp;a degree in economics and mathematics. He joined Aon Hewitt in 2010, where he quickly became an investment consultant advising on defined benefit and defined contribution pension schemes, before spending a year in the fiduciary management team.&nbsp;

Managing director and head of fiduciary oversight

Ellie Lloyd Jones joined Willis Towers Watson in 2017&nbsp;as a new graduate. Just over three years later, she became a senior associate within the client services team. She is responsible for five delegated investment clients with a&nbsp;combined annual revenue of $5m. She also works on the portfolio management team of&nbsp;the&nbsp;flagship Diversified Growth fund and Towers Watson Partners fund. Lloyd Jones was also an instrumental part of the team that transacted one of the largest buyouts in the bulk annuities market of the past 10 years, securing benefits for 10,300 pensioners and 2,200 deferred pensions. When she’s not organising Willis Towers Watson’s running club and tag rugby league, Lloyd Jones mentors two&nbsp;colleagues and sits on the shadow management committee, which acts as a sounding board for Willis Towers Watson’s European executive committee. Next, Lloyd Jones has her sights set on promotion to&nbsp;an associate director at Willis Towers Watson.

Senior associate

Growing up in a rural, working-class part of Wisconsin in the US, finance wasn’t on Katie Magee’s radar at all. Her childhood dream was to become a teacher before she considered pursuing a career in music. In the end, she decided to study economics, which took her into a role in the asset management business with JPMorgan in New York straight out of university. She moved to London a few years later and her current role includes developing new strategies and building relationships with clients in Emea and Asia-Pacific. She is the lead investment specialist for JPMorgan Asset Management’s relationship with digital platform Nutmeg and she recently led the launch of its Climate Change Solutions strategy into various markets. Magee believes her ability to establish relationships with her colleagues and her eagerness to embrace new assignments are among her key skills. She co-chairs JPMorgan Asset Management Solutions’ Women’s Initiative. Magee is also passionate about helping people from disadvantaged backgrounds through her involvement in internship programmes. From a disadvantaged background herself, she says she feels inspired to&nbsp;help others pursue opportunities.

Executive director, investment specialist, asset management solutions

As a child, Yasmin Meissner had two very different&nbsp;career ambitions: to be either the author of adventure-themed books or an entrepreneur. Her career in the financial services sector may be taking her closer to the latter. At BlackRock, Meissner oversees ESG research, integration and implementation across the firm’s $900bn multi-asset strategies and solutions business, her interest in sustainability igniting around the time CEO Larry Fink penned his now famous letter on ESG. Meissner was recently appointed co-portfolio manager of BlackRock’s first climate multi-asset fund. She is rapidly gaining a reputation as a leader and industry voice on ESG, having represented BlackRock’s position on the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation and the firm’s multi-asset approach on sustainability at JPMorgan’s ESG conference. Meissner says focusing on ESG brings out her creative side as it is a constantly evolving and innovating area of finance. Away from ESG, Meissner co-chairs BlackRock’s Women in Investments group, a forum for women to discuss issues they confront in the workplace. Meissner has ambitions to become a senior portfolio manager or chief investment officer and display the same leadership style as the&nbsp;man she cites as her inspiration — Pierre Sarrau, BlackRock’s CIO of multi-asset. But she admits to&nbsp;still harbouring a desire to write books one day.

Co-head of sustainable investing, multi-asset strategies & solutions

Pei - Rosengren

Sandy Pei says her love of all things business and&nbsp;stock markets-related came from her parents&nbsp;—&nbsp;her dad set up his own business when she was younger and her mum worked in finance. Today, she is deputy portfolio manager on the Federated Hermes’ Asia ex-Japan strategy, one of the top-performing funds investing in the region with assets&nbsp;under management of $3.9bn and annual returns of 10.7%. She works alongside the head of Asia ex-Japan, Jonathan Pines. Born and raised in China, Pei&nbsp;is the first Chinese executive director at Federated Hermes. She currently mentors three analysts in her&nbsp;majority&nbsp;female and Chinese team. Pei has recently launched a new China Equity fund, which she will co-manage. She will be focusing her efforts on this new vehicle and growing the team in the near future. Longer term, Pei would like to use her&nbsp;skills and knowledge to shape policy in Asia in&nbsp;a&nbsp;government or regulatory&nbsp;role.

Deputy portfolio manager, Asia ex-Japan

Ana Victoria Quaas’s passion for art took her to the University of St Andrews to study history of art. But her father worked in the financial sector and he passed on the importance of financial education and investing wisely to his daughter. Quaas therefore had a natural curiosity about pursuing an altogether different career. Her first professional exposure to the world of finance was as an equity research analyst with Dresdner Bank in 2005. She joined RobecoSAM in 2012 and there she led the development of the company’s ESG brand. Quaas has continued this at Fidelity International, which she joined in 2017 to lead its institutional marketing efforts. She has taken the lead on building out its ESG strategy, developing policies and Fidelity’s sustainable family fund range. She has trained and advised both clients and colleagues on approaches to climate change and impact investing. Last year, she joined the firm’s fixed income team, where she&nbsp;is&nbsp;responsible for its decarbonisation strategies and&nbsp;integrating ESG across the asset class.

Investment director

After admitting to himself he would never make it as a footballer, studying economics at school gave Aidan Quinn his first inclination that finance could be an attractive career path. Quinn started his career at Aon and joined Russell Investments in 2018. Just four years on, he now takes the lead on advising many of the firm’s institutional clients, including local authorities, corporates and pension scheme consolidators. Wales Pension Partnership (WPP), one of eight UK local government pension pools with overall assets of £22bn, is one of his key client relationships. Starting with a blank canvas, Quinn worked as the investment advisory and solutions partner for WPP on its fund range. He was also instrumental in the design of a bespoke sustainable active equity fund for WPP, a first for Russell Investments that will launch later this year. Quinn also took the lead in a new private markets opportunity for WPP, winning a public tender to support the build of a private credit solution, expected to be between £500m and £750m. Having obtained a CFA certificate in ESG and soon to take exams for the CFA certificate in climate change — one of the first students to study for the new qualification — Quinn has quickly become the go-to person for all sustainability-related matters in Russell Investments’ institutional team. Responsible for three direct reports, Quinn says he hopes one day to&nbsp;head up his own team and to continue his work in&nbsp;sustainable investing.

Associate director, UK institutional, Middle East and Africa

Growing up in Italy, Elena Rinaldi wanted to be an archaeologist. As it turns out, her brother followed that path, while her career took a very different route; Rinaldi is now portfolio manager at TwentyFour Asset Management, co-managing £7.1bn of assets in the asset-backed securities team. Rinaldi says she always wanted to work with numbers that can be applied to the real world. Today, she is responsible for the company’s ABS and sustainable ABS strategies, including the flagship Monument Bond fund and the Sustainable Enhanced Income ABS fund, which is the fastest-growing new fund in TwentyFour AM’s history — its assets under management have increased by 137% in the past year to £701m. She has also led the development from scratch of the ABS team’s ESG framework and&nbsp;sits on the company’s ESG committee, leading on all sustainability matters related to ABS. Rinaldi wants to continue working on sustainability and help TwentyFour AM reach the £50bn milestone in&nbsp;assets&nbsp;under management.

Malin Rosengren’s childhood ambition was to become a scuba-diving instructor. Then, a fascination with dinosaurs led her to consider palaeontology as a career. But today, Rosengren is the youngest and only female portfolio manager in BlueBay Asset Management’s investment grade team. Since joining BlueBay six years ago as an operational risk intern, she has risen speedily through the ranks and has just launched a new flagship strategy, for which she is lead portfolio manager. She puts her rapid ascent in the firm down to her individual approach and always questioning the consensus view. Rosengren oversees $5.9bn in AUM in BlueBay’s global government benchmark funds and absolute return funds. With her input, the BlueBay Investment Grade Global Aggregate Bond strategy has seen a 53% increase in assets over the past 12 months. She likes to look outside the box when investing, seeking opportunities that others have missed or disregarded in Central and Eastern Europe, Israel and the Philippines. And her approach is paying off — over the past 12 months, 84% of the trades she has closed have been in profit. Born in Sweden, she moved to the UK to study her post-grad in economics, before joining BlueBay.

Stemela Dagbo - Zicarelli

Thembeka Stemela Dagbo is the brains behind the M&amp;G (Lux) Diversity and Inclusion Fund, which she created and launched in January. The fund prioritises businesses that are empowering the disenfranchised and generating social impact. Stemela Dagbo is also deputy fund manager of M&amp;G’s Positive Impact Fund, which she helped create and market, and which invests in companies that are driving environmental and social change. Stemela Dagbo did not have a career trajectory in mind in her younger years, but instead had an interest in several professions. She wanted to get exposure to a variety of sectors through internships, securing placements in the finance department of Transnet and then PwC in South Africa while she was studying at the University of Cape Town. She then joined the equity research department at&nbsp;investment bank Credit Suisse, where she found herself examining the state of the economy. She moved to London while still working at the Swiss bank and then joined M&amp;G Investments in 2018 as an analyst, becoming a portfolio manager in 2019. Today, she attributes her success to embracing varied professional experiences and opportunities early on and to breaking out of her comfort zones, particularly when it came to projecting her voice in professional situations. Stemela Dagbo is also grateful to the trailblazing professional women who have acted as role models. Their examples and achievements have, she says, played a crucial role in&nbsp;her own professional life.

Fund manager

A finance career wasn’t always on Jodie Tapscott’s radar — in her younger years, she aspired to become a ballet dancer. But she was living in Asia during the region’s financial crisis in 1997, and the impact it had on her family’s business sparked her interest in world economic affairs. That led her to pursue a degree in economics and finance at the University of New South Wales. She says her love of diving and marine life has led to her interest in sustainable investing — she worked at specialist research firm Sustainalytics before joining AllianceBernstein in 2020. Now, with 16 years’ experience in financial services, Tapscott heads AllianceBernstein’s responsible investment strategy as the youngest member of the firm’s London leadership team. She is rapidly carving out a reputation among peers as an industry leader on all things ESG-related, including presenting at conferences and roundtables.&nbsp;

Director of responsible investing strategy

There were no signs of an interest in finance when Baylee Wakefield embarked on her undergraduate degree in biomedical science at the University of London. It was while she was studying for a master’s in genomic medicine at Cambridge that she joined the university’s finance and investment society. This opened her eyes to career options in the sector, and a desire for a more collaborative style of work won the day over life in a research lab. She joined Aviva Investors’ graduate scheme in 2018, using her scientific knowledge effectively as a healthcare equity analyst. Wakefield progressed quickly through the ranks from graduate to multi-asset portfolio manager, became a member of the asset allocation committee, passed the IMC exams and became a CFA charterholder. She is a diversity and inclusion advocate, launching Aviva’s Liquid Markets Women’s Network and hosting anti-racism discussions.&nbsp;

Multi-asset portfolio manager

As a child, Fiona Yang aspired to follow in her father’s footsteps by becoming a professor. She studied maths and economics at the London School of Economics, which is when she began to harness her interest in financial markets in earnest, joining the finance society and undertaking an internship in China with a local brokerage firm. This experience, coupled with growing up in China and being educated in Singapore, saw Yang accepted onto the Goldman Sachs graduate programme in 2012 and quickly becoming a China product specialist. Yang joined Invesco in 2017 where she has rapidly expanded her expertise in Asian investment markets, being promoted to fund manager of the Invesco Asian Equity Income fund in 2021. Under Yang’s watch, the fund’s performance has rocketed, moving from bottom to first quartile in its peer group as measured by the Investment Association. Earlier this year, Yang was also made co-fund manager of the Invesco Asia Trust, which has since also outperformed its benchmarks.

Fund manager Asia & EM equity

Bianca Ziccarelli is a founding member of the CAD 25bn (US $18.7bn) AUM sustainable energies group at CPP Investments, which invests money for the Canada Pension Plan. She is responsible for leading investments in European onshore renewables, a regional presence she helped establish that&nbsp;&nbsp;makes up about $4bn of the portfolio. Ziccarelli also led the creation of and is a board member for Renewable Power Capital, CPP Investments’ pan-European onshore renewables platform with more than €1bn in committed capital. Earlier this year, she led the assessment and approval of global agricultural trading business Viterra’s $3bn acquisition of Gavilon — CPP Investments has had a stake in Viterra since 2016. The Brazilian moved to the US for her post-graduate studies and joined CPP Investments in 2017. She moved to London in 2019 and was promoted from senior associate to principal. She was promoted to managing director in June this year.

Rising Stars of Fund Management 2022