Ann Miletti and Sonya Rorie could be what success in diversity looks like for the asset management industry – but that needs to change.

Earlier this year, Miletti (pictured) was named chief diversity officer at Allspring Global Investments with Rorie as her deputy. Miletti is also head of active equity at the $575bn US fund house and reports to Allspring CEO Joe Sullivan. Rorie was a client relations director, managing key corporate and endowment accounts.

‘Our path was not a straight one’ Rorie tells Citywire Amplify, ‘it was curved, and took twists and turns.’ To some extent that is the way of things. But for an industry with just 11.8% female fund managers – as revealed by Citywire’s Alpha Female report – just hoping more women and other diverse individuals fall into the sector isn’t enough. As Rorie, a black woman, puts it: ‘we’re not pointed to this industry’. Asset management ‘has an exposure problem’.

Miletti says the industry is indeed changing, but so are its clients. Allspring’s uncommon opportunity comes from the fact it is new. The asset manager was spun off from Wells Fargo in a sale to private equity firm GTCR and Reverence Capital Partners last November. Sullivan, who previously ran Legg Mason, was appointed to helm the new business.

The pair are ambitious but realistic. They want to exceed industry standards, but they talk carefully about building consensus and taking the whole organisation with them. But as selection giants such as JP Morgan Private Bank and RBC Wealth start implementing their own D&I policies, they know they need to move fast.

Citywire Amplify: How would you describe your roles?

Ann Miletti: Sonya and I are going to work from the bottom-up, but if you don’t send the signal that this is truly important to our organisation and that it’s a critical pillar of our company, then I think we’re probably going to fail out of the gate.

Rather than just put two people in charge of the whole thing, we’re thinking about how to embed it.

Sonya Rorie: I have heard first-hand what clients need in this space, and Ann has that perspective with the investment team. Being able to establish trust in the beginning and have an understanding of the business was critical. We are taking our time to be very methodical about what it is we want to do.

Part of my role is doing research. What are our best practices in the industry? What can we do differently? Our role is to meet with our partners across the organisation and establish relationships on how we can tie those together. We look at diversity, not as a programme or an initiative, but as a function of the business.

What would your KPIs be? The thing you’ll have to answer is how you are evidencing that progress is being made.

Ann Miletti: If we don’t change the numbers, we’re not successful.

I think the ultimate success for Sonya and me is that we work ourselves out of a job. Now, that’s not a three-to-five-year goal.

I started in this industry a long time ago, 30-plus years, and I was one of the only females. Certainly, I didn’t know anyone else that had a background like mine. I didn’t feel like I belonged for most of my career. We need to erase that feeling for any diverse person.

We haven’t established the policy yet. We’re building the very foundational blocks. The end goal will be to establish a way that we can measure it and that we can be held accountable for it.

At the very heart of it is data and data collection, and the integrity of data.

We look at diversity, not as a programme or an initiative, but as a function of the business – Sonya Rorie

Lack of diversity can be a catch-22 situation.

Ann Miletti: Yes, it’s a key problem if you don’t see people that look like you or have similar backgrounds. Our industry is not as well known or understood unless you know somebody in the industry. And because of the dominance of one kind of class, it is very hard for diverse people to understand what opportunities might be there for them.

When you’re in it, you truly understand the positive aspects of this business, and how much you can help people. This is something Sonya and I are both passionate about.

My background is very unusual. I wasn’t very comfortable talking about it, to be quite honest. Up until maybe 10 years ago. I never quite felt good enough, my resumé against a lot of other people, because it looks so different. I didn’t realise there were a lot of other people that felt that way too. Our stories can empower other people.

We need to think outside the box and look for talent where other people may not be, and then bring them in and train them.

Sonya Rorie: I know first-hand what it’s like for people to invest in the minority community, develop them, and what success can look like on the other side, because you were focused and intentional about the investment end of it. Representation matters. People want to see themselves in other people.

Our goal is to not even come to industry standards. That is not the bar. The question is: what can we do to exceed industry standards? I always say: ‘This is a decades-old problem, and you don’t solve a decades-old problem overnight.’ The issue of diversity is very complex.

We’re asking: Where can we have the most impact? Where can we look at talent differently? Where can we go that people are not looking at schools, that they are not looking at? What other programmes can we look at? What people can we look at, internally and externally, that may not have the check-the-box requirements, but their skills and talents can be developed?’ I’m excited about being in this role. It will allow people to see what success looks like with an investment in talent.

Retention is as big a challenge as recruitment, certainly for women fund managers.

Ann Miletti: Retention is a huge problem. It’s also a huge focus of ours. If you’re feeling like you belong someplace, like you’re part of the team, part of the success story, it’s going to be harder for you to disconnect and leave.

Our industry does have a big dropout rate when it comes to women, especially [In 2021, the turnover rate for women fund managers was 44%, for men it was 31%]. But we’re not just losing them to other companies, we’re losing them from the industry altogether.

I don’t fully know the answers to all the reasons why. There’s never just one reason why you pick up and leave. I do wonder if the last couple of years, although they’ve been challenging, they’ve taught us all something about the need for flexibility and balance in our lives.

We’re also having discussions with our partners in HR. What kind of policies do we need to change? Do we need to focus on retention and then recruiting new talent? Retention actually might be more important than recruitment, but it gets kind of thought of more secondarily for most people.

Sonya Rorie: I was really happy to hear Ann say the word ‘belonging’. If you can have a level of success by bringing your whole authentic self to work, I think that makes you feel immensely part of the culture.

And what about recruitment?

Ann Miletti: Here’s a what-if scenario. A portfolio manager has two open roles. He has been telling me for two-plus years how important it is for him to get more diversity on his team, but how challenging it is because there’s a real pipeline issue, and he has a set of criteria.

If I could tap him on the shoulder and say: ‘You know what? There’s nobody more impactful than you to go talk to our Black African American employee group, or our women’s group, and talk to them about the challenges you are having filling these roles.’

I bet you might get some really good ideas and not just about recruiting for that talent, but maybe then how you might be able to retain that talent or keep them. That’s just bringing people together to problem-solve.

Allspring had 13 funds with mixed teams and three female-only teams in our 2021 Alpha Female report. Are you driving mixed teams?

Ann Miletti: Our operations team might look different from our investment teams, and our distribution teams might look different from our technology team. Our marketing team might look different from our compliance team.

What we want to do is think about it across the organisation, and look at the diversity dimensions across each of those channels from the bottom up. Talk to each of those leaders about what it looks like today, what they might be missing, and then potentially set some goals. We’re not quite there yet, but you can tell where our minds are going.

On the investment team side, it’s no surprise that it has been a challenge. Not just for our company, but for many companies. As head of equity, I hopefully hold a little bit of credibility.

By the way, they’re also hearing it from our clients. Sonya has a very strong voice there, and they’re feeling the pressure as well.

What conversations are you having with your clients?

Sonya Rorie: Our clients understand and know the value of diversity and what that brings into the investment process, and that you can enhance performance by having that diversity of thought.

If you think about the DNA of how investment teams work, they like the debate and the challenge of having unique perspectives, and diversity brings that. Somebody could bring something to the table you have never thought about before, because you may have a certain lived experience and now this person brings a completely different frame of mind.

Clients know and recognise that. Clients want to know what policies you have in place: what practices, what programmes.

Ultimately, this is a relationship business, and it’s about building relationships with clients, as well as our employees, external partners, organisations and students. I think it’s only right that clients ask.

Life before asset management

Inroads: ‘Instrumental’ college programme could teach fund firms a thing or two

Founded in the 1970s by a corporate executive, Inroads’ mission is ‘to develop and place talented minority youth in business and industry and prepare them for corporate and community leadership’. Rorie is one such talent who made it onto an Inroads programme in North Carolina. She joins one of 30,000 Inroads alumni, many pursuing careers in corporate America across 48 states. The programmes are not asset management specific. When she took part, it was focused on accounting, banking, manufacturing, fashion industry, ‘wherever there was underrepresentation’.

‘After you spent your summers in these development programmes, early in your college career in-between freshman and sophomore, then you were placed with internships, and a lot of those were with large Fortune 500 companies. I was placed with KPMG, a big-six public accounting firm. It taught me to be successful in an environment even when I was underrepresented.’

Rorie says the programme gave students skills and outlook so they did not feel ‘like you were on an island by yourself’ even as the only person in that organisation from a certain background. That programme was instrumental in my success in corporate America.’

This is part of the experience Rorie wants to directly emulate at Allspring. ‘The responsibility of a great organisation is to make you feel like you’re not by yourself. It’s to develop that culture, that sense of belonging; that I can bring my whole self to work and be successful.’

To see more about the Citywire Alpha Female Report, click here. The 2022 report will be published in September.