From Broken Hill to Finance Maverick - Adam Verwey is About To Do It Again

Today's friend of the pod is Adam Verwey, someone I was really pleased to meet towards the end of 2023 and he began sharing with me his work at SIX - Sustainable Investment Exchange - and how it was going to deliberately combine the worlds of activism and change making with that of retail wealth management. I was immediately excited to begin to appreciate how Adam and his team are looking to extend the ethical investment world into something that leverages the passion and enthusiasm of everyday people to drive intentional and deliberate change within large listed businesses.

Over my career I've come to appreciate that change is largely only possible in big corporate institutions with the buy in and support of top executives and board directives. Something that has been difficult to access and work towards in busy, myopic and short termist organisational cultures where shareholder primacy and obligation management are most important. At the same time, the advent of many disclosure frameworks have created a pretty strong, and in my opinion inaccurate, signal that issues like climate change and modern slavery are being managed effectively. I'm firmly of the belief that institutional capital has an enormous potential to be directed into or away from creating the societies and economies we want to exist in. Its opportunity to intervene in meaningful ways to alter the trajectory we as a species are currently on is incredible, only matched by the incredible barriers and challenges that exist in breaching the mindsets and psychologies that keep the current system largely locked in place.

Enter SIX, and the likes of Adam Verwey. A financial services maverick who for two decades has been pioneering new ways of thinking about and investing for meaningful change. He spent nearly a decade at Australian Ethical Investments, before going on to co-found Future Super - Australia's first truly no fossil fuel exposed super fund. A couple of years ago he took a sabbatical and is returning to the scene at the moment with his very exciting new venture SIX.

We speak about SIX, going through what they're doing, how they're doing it, why they're doing it and what that means for you as a customer. We get into some of Adam's background and origin story and why and how he's managed to sustain himself, where ethical investing has come from and is possibly going towards, as well as the opportunity for you to participate in their open crowdfunding process. head to Birchal.com/company/six for more information on this and join the expression of interest registry.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Adam, and I appreciated the time in a really busy week for him and his team. I came away reminded and encouraged that people like Adam continue to press and seek to persuade change in systemic ways and that it's possible to use the existing tools of the system to do this. I hope by listening you're able to gain a new perspective on what might be right under your nose to attempt to use as a vehicle for action.

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