Hello and welcome to our podcast series Centre Stage.

I'm Georgie Russell, an associate director and part of the coaching team at Bladenmore.

In Centre Stage, we tackle the issues that business communicators face, from investor and brand

communications to ESG ambitions to employee engagement.

In each episode, we're joined by guest speakers from a range of industries to hear what they think

works, how they solve problems and what they see as the latest trends. In this episode, we're

joined by two guests from one of the largest pension funds in the world,

the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan,

headquartered in Toronto, with offices in London, San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mumbai,

administering pensions for over 330,000 active and retired teachers.

So who are our guests? Henrietta Dane is the Director of Communications for Europe,

and Kevin McGurgan is Director of Government and Public Affairs for the same region.

Thanks for joining us, Henrietta and Kevin.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. So Henrietta, starting with you, because I know that in a former life,

you were on the agency side, supporting clients with their communications from the outside in.

And now, not only are you doing that from the inside out, but you're doing that job within a huge super allocator. So firstly, what drew you to corporate communications and what's that

transition being like? Thank you, Georgie. Initially, I think I would say I fell into corporate

communications rather than was drawn to it. I knew I was interested in current affairs. I didn't

really know how you could make a career out of that. And it was some very good advice from someone

that's still a mentor today that I might want to look at PR and communications. And I ended up in

the finance industry after an internship and absolutely loved it. So that started a career. I think at the time,

...