Hello, welcome to Impact Insides, the podcast series of Assyria as plant managers.

In today's unusual episode, we interview John Duncan, the new CEO of Astoria,

about his career and his thoughts about the Building Bridges event Astoria sponsored last week.

Hi, John. Thank you for being here today. How are you?

I'm well, thanks Sylvia. Really great to be here. You are the new CEO of Astoria Investment

Managers. What was your career journey like? How did you get to where you are today?

Yeah, interesting. So I started out life as an engineer and I did a postgraduate master's degree in environmental science. And I started out my career working as a mining engineer with an environmental focus. And then I sort of moved on to the field of environmental consulting. And there I spent a lot of time working with

companies around the world helping them with resource efficiency social and environmental issues

and then towards the back end of my consulting career which spent about 18 years I was a partner

at a global consultancy and there I did a lot of work with banks and private equity firms on sustainability

related issues concerning investments.

And then about 11 years ago I joined Old Mutual, which is a 176 year old, 100 billion

euro pension fund and I set up and ran their responsible investment

in sustainable investing practice. And there I worked across their private equity, the listed

equity, their fixed income practices, really helping position the team and the business

around this long-run transition.

Okay.

Last week, your first public appearance as the new CEO of Asteria was your participation as a panelist

at Building Bridges in a discussion called Finance in the New World.

How do you feel about this event?

Yeah, it felt really good to participate at the Building Bridges event.

It's my first time.

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