Archives: Ambassadors

Mr Yariv Haim is Co-Founder and CEO at Sparrows Capital Limited.

Mr. Haim’s broad experience spans strategic investing, risk and asset allocation, business development, market analysis and Enterprise Resource Planning systems implementation.

Mr Haim is an accomplished professional with strong presentation, technical, and management skills. He is a sought after lecturer in the area of wealth management, particularly on the subject of efficient and evidence-based investing strategies.

Under Mr. Haim’s leadership Sparrows Capital Limited provides world-class financial services focusing on long term liquid capital market investments, delivering high-efficiency beta and selective beta solutions including strategic asset allocation, hedging, risk management and systematic rebalancing.

Mr Haim is a graduate of the Recanati Executive-MBA Program and holds a BA in Economics, both with the Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Gareth has been involved in the Financial Services Industry for over 30 years . He has a wealth of experience in both the retail and corporate market and wishes to use that experience to help the TTF work towards an industry which is fit for purpose.

Gareth also acts as a Non Executive Director for several companies and provides Pro Bono technical advice to Insolvency Practitioners trying to recover client monies lost due to distressed or failed investment schemes.

In addition to the above Gareth sits as a Magistrate and has found this to be true eye opener and has help him gain  perspective which has been useful in all aspects of his life both business and personal.

Charlotte Tyrwhitt- Drake is a Director at Pensions for Purpose and lead consultant at Impact Challenger Ltd focused on impact investment, particularly working to get capital moving through the impact investment chain. Charlotte is also a member of the CFA Brain Trust initiative to bring impact investing standards to real asset investments.

Charlotte has over 14 years of experience working with well-known investment managers, and a consultant, including Jupiter Asset Management, Pictet Asset Management and Cambridge Associates. She started as a fund analyst and has built significant expertise developing advisory and fiduciary relationships with pension funds, with knowledge across public and private asset classes. Charlotte is a passionate advocate of ESG, impact investing and transparency. She has collaborated with the Society of Pension Professionals to co-author a white paper on Social Impact Investment and has spoken on the topic of cost transparency at PLSA and Transparency Taskforce events.

For the last decade Alan has been an active and independent problem solver, and implementer, for pension service providers and employers wanting to improve their pensions and pensions investment propositions. To this end, he has been delivering improvement and change for companies across the sector. However, he is also a champion of financial well being, of which pension provision is a part, and the use of smart technologies (eg open data and artificial intelligence) as tools to equip everyone with their personal financial world, as they want it, on their phone.

Previously Alan was Pensions Manager at two of the largest private sector DB pension schemes of their time (Associated British Foods and Marks and Spencer) but identifying in the early 1990’s that DB schemes were unsustainable at realistic costs for private and public sector companies, and that employees were attracted to DC pensions for their transparency, ownership and transferability, even when they understood the relative long term financial differences in value between them, he joined Fidelity as they were beginning to introduce DC into the UK. Here he helped set up the business and led the client management and development structure and helped grow Fidelity’s business and governance credentials while representing the company in the trustee boardrooms across the UK and beyond.

He has worked in virtually every part of the corporate or workplace pensions sector and been close to the customers of the many propositions he has been associated with in order to improve customer experience and corporate efficiency throughout the product and proposition delivery chain. In voluntary work he has provided practical help to pension scheme members who were victims of the Maxwell company pension schemes collapse and was a member of the original TPAS volunteer force supporting members of any pension scheme to understand, or get redress, when failed in some way by their scheme. He has been a member of both the Manufacturing Industry and the Retail Industry Pension Managers Groups and of the PRAG (pension accountants research group) initiative, the Pension Administration Large Schemes Survey, a body examining operational efficiency, effectiveness, and unit costs amongst some of the UKs largest pension schemes.

Alan invites you to check out his profile on LinkedIn and connect at www.linkedin.com/in/alansalamon

Alistair is Professor of Financial Economics at the School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, He previously worked at Cass Business School, the Bank of England; the University of Surrey, London Business School, HM Treasury and for the Government of Malawi.

Alistair has conducted policy focused economics research since the early 1980s, His PhD in economics at the Financial Markets Group of the London School of Economics highlighted on the macroeconomic consequences of financial constraints on corporate inventory investment. In his subsequent career his research has focused on bank risk and capital management, financial crises, disaster risk finance (including pandemic risks), development finance, financial infrastructure such as payment systems and securities clearing and settlement, and financial regulation. His work is characterised by close engagement with practitioners and policy makers, seeking to obtain economic insight into major policy and business questions informed by detailed understanding of the institutional arrangements and organisations engaged in financial intermediation and their historical development.

His current research is focused on the emerging financial technologies, including the economics of new payments technologies, the implications of widening access to central bank balance sheets, open banking, ‘peer to peer’ lending platforms and the application of AI, distributed ledgers and related data technologies in financial services. Here he stresses the complementary roles of government and the private sector. A key but too often neglected role of the public authorities in financial innovation is ensuring co-ordination of private sector effort, including agreement and adoption of technical standards and shared operational processes, overcoming private reluctance to collaborate on technical change because benefits are diffuse and innovation can undermine the market power of incumbents.

Alistair strongly supports the goals of the Transparency Task Force, arguing in particular that collaboration on developing and industry wide adoption of technical standards is a pre-requisite for overcoming information barriers and ensuring that senior management, customers and clients, advisers,  investors and regulators are as well informed as they can be about financial transactions, including their costs, charging and consequences for risk exposure.

Jan Floyd-Douglass’s career over the past 25+ years has comprised senior corporate roles such as Head of Zurich Corporate Pensions, Global Sales Director and Executive Committee member, Barclays Private Bank and Resident Vice President, Consumer Lending, Citibank. Her role accountabilities have included global strategic and propositional development, leading and embedding significant global change programmes and the planning, delivery and evaluation of high growth and turnaround strategies.

In addition, she has pioneered and led global equality and ethical management programmes whilst pursuing her senior leadership career and beyond. Her women’s leadership development work led to her being nominated as a UK Woman of the Year 2005. She was a Commissioner of the Women’s National Commission (WNC), with a special remit for its Women on Boards policy in 2009/10.

Jan uses her experience with clients with whom she works on their performance, growth and transformation strategies, with a particular focus on board effectiveness and leading through uncertainty.  Clients are from various sectors including the military, banking, charities, infrastructure, pharma, telecommunications, finservs, travel and utilities.

Jan is a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership and Management and was cited as one of the ‘100 Best Global Coaching Leaders’ by the World HRD Congress in 2017. She became a Fellow of The RSA in September 2017, and a Member of its Fellowship Council in 2018, and participates in various elements of the RSA’s social change agenda.

Jan also enjoys the leadership development side of her business activity. She increasingly delivers her leadership workshops for both clients and other management consultancies, locally and globally. She has also lectured on board effectiveness to new senior officer recruits of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst on their Colonels and Generals’ Programmes.

Jan has been on the UK board of the International Women’s Forum and is a past speaker at the global IWF Leadership Fellows programmes in Vancouver, Miami and Atlanta; partnered with Harvard Business School and INSEAD. She presented at American Express’ 2020 Global Leadership Summit in Miami in February 2020.

Past third sector roles also include Vice President of UN Women UK and past-Chair of Rosa, the UK Fund for Women and Girls.

Jan was elected a Borough Councillor in the May 2019 local elections in Waverley, Surrey.

Seb has been working in financial services since 2004 and a regulated financial planner since 2007.  He launched Switchfoot Wealth in 2018 and Switchfoot Teams in 2019 with an ambition to improve financial planning for later life clients and support attorneys, court-appointed deputies and trustees in their important role.  Seb is working with the Transparency Taskforce to raise awareness of LPA abuse, the particular risks of drawdown pensions in this context, and what can be done to protect vulnerable consumers from harm.