The Future of Finance Podcast

Fiduciary Duty in Focus Applying Fiduciary Duties to System-level Investing

Tools and dashboards are only actionable if they are grounded in fiduciary clarity. Maurits Dolman (Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, speaking in his own capacity) and George Suttles (Commonfund Institute) examine how fiduciary duty—properly understood—requires investors to consider risks and responsibilities that arise at the level of ...

Amy Jaffe, Director of the Energy, Climate Justice & Sustainability Lab at NYU, joins Georges Dyer for a rigorous, wide-ranging conversation on how institutional investors need to be thinking about energy risk, climate justice, and long-term capital allocation right now. As one of the most respected voices at the intersection of energy markets, sustainability, and institutional finance, Jaffe brings analytical precision and on-...

US SIF: https://web.cvent.com/event/e6c2819f-b8d1-4861-bc7c-21a6e47c6c66/summary

Institutional investors are confronting a structural shift in how risk, return, and resilience are shaped. Climate instability, inequality, democratic fragility, and market concentration are no longer peripheral concerns—they are system-level forces that increasingly determine portfolio outcomes. Yet the dominant tools of modern investment prac...

Dave Helgerson, Managing Director and Head of Impact Investing at Hamilton Lane — one of the world's leading private markets firms with over $1 trillion in assets under management — joins Georges Dyer to make the case that impact investing is not a values compromise but a structural opportunity.

With over 22 years at Hamilton Lane building impact strategies from the ground up, Dave offers a rare inside view of how insti...

The Intentional Endowments Network's 2026 Virtual Forum convenes June 2–4, bringing together institutional investors, legal scholars, climate strategists, and asset management practitioners for three days of structured dialogue on system-level investing, fiduciary duty, and long-term capital markets reform.

Register using code IENGUEST at https://www.intentionalendowments.org/2026_virtual_forum

In this preview episode, IEN E...

Akasha Absher, Co-President at Syntrinsic — an institutional advisory firm managing approximately $3 billion for foundations, endowments, and nonprofits — offers a rare inside view into how investment consultants evaluate mission-aligned managers, advise fiduciaries on portfolio construction, and help clients navigate the tension between financial objectives and long-term systemic risk. As OCIOs and consultants become c...

Register for IEN's Virtual Forum here: https://www.intentionalendowments.org/2026_virtual_forum

Emily Goldstein-McGowan, Vice President and Head of Growth & Venture Capital at Malk Partners, the foremost ESG advisor to private market investors, joins Georges Dyer to examine how institutional asset owners and GPs are navigating the governance, risk, and due diligence dimensions of responsible AI. Drawing on Malk's landmark 2024...

Maurits Dolmans, Senior Counsel at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and co-author of Sustainable Fiduciary Duty: How Fiduciary Duties Can Be a Key to Escaping the Climate Prisoner's Dilemma (Net Zero Lawyers Alliance, November 2025), joins Georges Dyer on his own behalf to make a precise legal and economic argument: existing fiduciary law already requires institutional investors to address systemic climate risk, and he lays out...

Artist, National Geographic Explorer, and Chief Network Architect of the Shareholder Democracy Network, Asher Jay, joins host Georges Dyer to examine one of the most underleveraged mechanisms in institutional investing: proxy voting. For endowment leaders, CIOs, and asset managers navigating pressure to demonstrate mission alignment, this conversation offers a practical and structural framework for how shareholder voice can be rest...

Paul Fehlinger, Senior Director of Policy, Investment & Innovation at Project Liberty, a 500 million initiative building an AI and data economy that advances voice, choice and stakes, joins Georges Dyer on the Future of Finance podcast to unpack what responsible AI actually means for institutional capital markets. Drawing on his decade leading the Internet and Jurisdiction Policy Network and his current work convening LPs, GPs,...

Institutional investors are increasingly exposed to AI-driven risks that operate at the system level — spanning climate commitments, labor markets, and democratic governance. Whitney Shepard, Co-Executive Director of Majority Action, joins Georges Dyer on the Future of Finance podcast to lay out the research, frameworks, and stewardship strategies that investors need to navigate this moment responsibly.

Majority Action's emer...

Drake Hicks, Vice President and Head of Impact at Variant Investments, joins host Georges Dyer for a grounded, practitioner-level conversation on how private credit can be structured to deliver measurable social and environmental outcomes without sacrificing market-rate returns. Before joining Variant — an alternative credit manager with nearly $3 billion in AUM specializing in uncorrelated, income-generating assets across ni...

What does 25 years of dedicated clean energy investing reveal about today's institutional opportunity? In this episode of the Future of Finance podcast, host Georges Dyer speaks with Daniel G. Weiss, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Angeleno Group — a Los Angeles-based venture and growth equity firm that has led or co-led over $3 billion into clean energy and climate solutions since 2001, with a limited partner base drawn l...

What does fiduciary duty actually require when you own the whole economy? Madison Condon, Associate Professor at Boston University School of Law and recipient of the American Law Institute's Early Career Scholars Medal, brings one of the most rigorous legal and economic frameworks in climate finance to the Future of Finance podcast.

For institutional investors, pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds, climate change i...

Fran Seegull, President of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance, joins host Georges Dyer for a wide-ranging conversation on the structural forces reshaping institutional investing. Before leading the Alliance, which she co-founded with Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation, Fran served as Chief Investment Officer of ImpactAssets, overseeing its $3 billion impact investing donor-advised fund, and taught graduate-level impact investing ...

Systemic climate risk is increasingly recognized across capital markets but how should institutional investors engage with the policy drivers shaping that risk?

In this episode of the Future of Finance podcast, host Georges Dyer speaks with Richard Roberts, Inquiry Lead at Volans, about the intersection of systemic risk, fiduciary duty, and investor engagement on real-economy climate policy.

For long-horizon asset owners, disclosur...

Climate change is not only an environmental issue but a capital markets risk management challenge.

In this episode of the Future of Finance podcast, Georges Dyer speaks with Bob Litterman, former Partner and Head of Risk Management at Goldman Sachs and Chair of the CFTC Climate-Related Market Risk Subcommittee. Bob shares why climate change should be understood through the lens of systemic risk, incentives, and pricing distortions.

What role should investors play in addressing systemic risks like climate change, inequality, and biodiversity loss?

In this episode of the Future of Finance podcast, we speak with Caroline Flammer, Director of the Sustainable Investing Research Initiative (SIRI) at Columbia University, about system-level investing, fiduciary duty, and the limits of modern portfolio theory.

What we cover:

• Why systemic risks should be treated a...

Modern finance typically optimizes profit, but not human well-being. Investor and author Jenna Nicholas explains why that’s a problem, and how we can fix it.

In this episode of The Future of Finance Podcast, George Dyer sits down with Jenna Nicholas, President of LightPost Capital and author of Enlightened Bottom Line.

They explore:

• Why GDP and profit fail to measure human flourishing
• How spirituality, purpose, and finan...