Q&A with Gillian Evans: Creating meaningful impact for clients

How do you seek to identify opportunities and realise them for our clients, communities and people? 

It really starts with our clients. We listen and seek to understand what they are hoping to achieve and aim to ask the right questions by harnessing our expertise from an investment perspective. We are then able to leverage our knowledge of different types of asset owners and match this with where there are opportunities.

Having the social licence to make better investment opportunities while ensuring it has meaningful impact on the lives of people around the world is incredibly important.

Although it starts with developing and implementing investment solutions for clients, we are cognisant of the impact of the investments we make on their behalf. For example, in creating a strategy that aims to deliver long-term inflation-linked cash flows to support the payment of pensions, we’ve financed a number of NHS hospitals in the Midlands to better serve those communities.

How does your team encourage innovation and how does our structure and way of working ensure that everyone has a voice?

One of the great things about Macquarie is that we have a relatively flat organisational structure. The hierarchy that you sometimes see, and that I've certainly experienced in other organisations, is much less pronounced here. There's no exclusivity on where a good idea can come from.

An example of this is our secondary infrastructure equity capability, which has been developed organically by bringing secondaries expertise into the organisation. Macquarie Asset Management is well known as an infrastructure asset manager. We invest across a diverse range of asset classes, but infrastructure is often the starting point when asset owners and clients think of us. As the asset class we've been investing in for decades matures, it’s a natural extension for us to have a secondary infrastructure equity capability. And so we've developed that with a dedicated team that sits alongside our primary infrastructure equity team, adding to our broader expertise in the asset class and our ability to deliver for our clients.

Nothing we deliver comes without a collaborative approach. Involving our investment teams, client-facing teams, and our operational, regulatory, legal and finance colleagues, everyone plays a part and there is a huge collaborative effort in everything that we do.

As a global organisation with over 20,000 employees, how do you maintain relationships and build your network, and what are the benefits to this? 

I have regular engagement with different businesses, central functions and counterparts in different parts of the world to exchange knowledge.

Although we are a global organisation, there are nuances that are specific to local markets, which is important for us to be aware of. But being able to share knowledge, experience and solutions is additive, both for us as an organisation, and ultimately for the clients who are trusting us with their capital to invest.

How do you balance the commitments of your role with your health and wellbeing?

Working at Macquarie means working in an environment with high expectations. This provides interesting and stimulating challenges, but also means you need to be deliberate about finding balance. I mostly do that through the organisation’s support for flexibility which enables me to prioritise commitments outside of work – whether that's family or my own interests – around the demands of a really challenging and interesting role. I am also very conscious of supporting others to prioritise their wellbeing – whatever that looks like for them.

Macquarie has various employee networks that help connect employees on the synergies we might experience in life. The organisation is supportive and recognises that maintaining high-performing teams means that, while we invest on behalf of our clients, we're also investing in ourselves.