Investment Reputation Manager in City of London

Nest Invest is on an ambitious journey to become one of the world’s largest asset owners. With c. £60 billion AUM today, we’re on track to manage more than £160bn within a decade. This rapid growth brings exciting opportunities and increasing operational complexity.

As our portfolio expands, we shall internally manage more of the investment decision making and process, whilst concurrently engaging with a broader range of external partners. As a result, operational excellence becomes more critical than ever. We’re building a capability and culture that embraces innovation, leverages technology, and harnesses the power of data to deliver exceptional outcomes for our members.

The Investment Reputation Manager will support this growth by enhancing and evolving two key areas:

• Identifying ‘unintended consequences’ of changes to Nest Invest’s investment strategy and corporate structure and where these changes may generate reputational risks.
• Exploring and analysing Nest's current investment portfolio, its mandates and external fund managers, to identify potential reputational risks and recommend ways these strategies and/or structures can be enhanced to better manage reputational risks.

There are specific reputational pressures facing Nest that other typical UK institutional investors don’t share – we’re a public body, in receipt of government loans, a vocal promoter of responsible investment, the largest pension scheme representing a third of the UK workforce, and most of our members are defaulted into us without choosing Nest. This all creates reputational pressures that are often not considered by a typical institutional investor.

As an organisation, Nest Invest ultimately wants to enhance its ability to assess and mitigate reputational risks, and the successful candidate should help bring new ideas on how Nest Invest can improve and evolve its current approach.

This is an incredibly exciting time in Nest Invest’s future growth agenda and the successful Investment Reputation Manager will play a key role in ensuring the organisation is successful in achieving their long-term strategic ambitions.

We are looking for:

• An established and passionate Investment Analyst/Manager with either experience of reputational risk or a broad exposure to multiple asset classes (private and/or public markets) and an interest in developing the strategy.
• The ability to work constructively across a complex investment management team to embed the reputational risk strategy working closely with investment managers.
• An Investment professional familiar with the monitoring of news outlets, government consultation releases and other data sources to be alert to any changes that could inform the reputation risk framework.
• Excellent senior stakeholder engagement and business partnering skills and the ability to articulate and present to senior stakeholders at Board and Executive Investment Committee level on the existing, as well as potential, reputational risks facing the organisation.
• Experience of facing off to and engaging with public bodies and government officials would be highly advantageous.

Nest is an award-winning workplace pension scheme, the largest in the country in terms of members. Set up by the government to give every worker in the UK somewhere to save, our first-class responsible investment practice and governance are the backbone of what we do, supported by all the functions you’d expect to find in a thriving business. We’re committed to creating a workplace where you can be your authentic self and offer an inclusive and flexible working environment.

The Investment directorate (Nest Invest) is responsible for investing members’ contributions in order to grow their retirement pots over the long-term. The responsibilities of the team include:

• Asset allocation and portfolio risk management
• Manager selection and monitoring
• Responsible investment
• Investment communications
• Fund administration
• Investment technology and financial modelling
• Contributing to the development of the investment proposition

From December 2019, the Nest Investment team was seconded into Nest Invest Ltd (Nest Invest), the investment subsidiary of Nest Corporation. Nest Invest is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). For the role holder, this means working in a regulated entity, and being required to adhere to certain rules and behaviours included in the FCA’s Code of Conduct (COCON), specifically the individual Conduct Rules defined by the FCA.

Flexible and agile working: Everyone's personal situation is different. To make the most out of hybrid working, we’ve introduced different ways of working, which include (subject to role requirements):

• hybrid of office (Canary Wharf, London) and home working (there will be an expectation to attend the office, once - twice a week, or more, as required)
• reduce or vary working hours
• reduce or vary the days worked
• work compressed hours
• job share

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Everyone is welcome to apply for our roles and we particularly encourage applications from Black, Asian and minority ethnicity, LGBTQ+, and disabled candidates. We are determined to ensure that no applicant or employee receives less favourable treatment because of their age, belief, disability, gender identity, marital status, national origin, pregnancy or caring responsibilities, socio-economic background, sex, sexual orientation, religion or race or any other legally protected status. We also recognise the importance of diversity of thought and other forms of neurocognitive variation. As a Level 2 Disability Confident organisation, we’re part of the guaranteed interview scheme. This means should you meet the minimum criteria for this role, you will automatically be put forward for an interview.

Please note that this advert may close early if we receive a sufficient number of satisfactory applications.