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(August-2002) In the governance hot seat
For Lisa Fazio, the path taken on her way to becoming HESTA’s (and the industry’s) first investment and governance manager has certainly been more winding than the athletics track she was more accustomed to running on in her youth.
Fazio is a former member of the Melbourne-based Mentone Amateur Athletics Club, and a talented sprinter over 100 and 200 metres. But she turned her back on the possibility of becoming a professional athlete to pursue a career that didn’t require running-spikes instead.
“It really got to the stage where I wanted a professional career. I only ever really ran for the love of it … I felt I didn’t have the mental drive or ambition to become the best there was,” she says.
But her career development has been more analogous to a ‘decathlon’ event rather than a sprint straight into the perfect role.
Fazio’s first role after graduating from university with an Applied Sciences degree was to work as a sales representative for Coca-Cola Amatil (CCA), where she quickly rose through the ranks and into a management position, responsible for heading-up a marketing campaign, and a team of other representatives, in Malaysia.
However, after becoming intellectually dissatisfied in the role, she left CCA and took up a similar position with German pharmaceutical company, Boehringer Ingelheim.
“While Coca-Cola was a wonderful experience, I didn’t feel intellectually stimulated and thought the medical industry would offer that,” she says.
However, Fazio quickly became disenchanted with this role too, believing she was no more than “a medium of communication between scientists and doctors”.
It was at this stage that she entered the realm of financial services, using the post-graduate diploma in financial planning she acquired while at Boehringer Ingelheim, to become an adviser at RetireInvest.
“I have a love-hate relationship with financial planning … I entered the industry to be a professional that could provide a service and work on behalf of individuals saving for their retirement. [Yet] I quickly realised there was a conflict of interest — between a corporate structure that had targets and chased commissions, and providing the best service to clients.
“It’s not that money is a bad thing, it’s what’s done with it that makes it bad,” Fazio says.
Fazio then moved into a number of corporate governance and compliance roles. First, as the national financial planning and training manager at AXA Australia, then as a product manager for financial planning software at Lonsdale.
Understanding corporate governance and compliance were also integral parts of her role as director of financial planning for the Ethical Investment Company of Australia (EICA), the position she held prior to her appointment at HESTA.
“Compliance has always been part of what I’ve done [within the financial services industry], particularly during my time at EICA,” she says.
The position at HESTA, which has more than 475,000 members, is comprised of two components: investment and investment governance.
For Fazio, the investment component involves liaising on a day-to-day basis with the fund’s asset consultant, Frontier Investment Consulting. HESTA’s CEO, Anne-Marie Corboy, previously monitored investments, but Fazio’s appointment has given Corboy more time to fulfil her other obligations at HESTA.
The corporate governance component primarily involves assuring the fund’s right to vote its share proxies is honoured. The role exists even though trustees in Australia, unlike their counterparts in the UK and US, are not being legally bound to vote in shareholder proxies.
“Corporate governance is a hot topic with all the recent corporate scandals and collapses, both here and in the US … [Therefore,] there is a view that [pension] funds have a responsibility — as globally they are the largest shareholders in these companies — to make a difference through voting proxies,” Fazio says.
Fazio believes the role of a compliance officer is to ensure that funds themselves adhere to legislation directly affecting their operations, such as the FSR and SIS Acts. This, she says, is different to corporate governance, which involves monitoring the activities of the companies in which the fund invests.
“In our capacity as a superannuation fund for the health and community services industry, we are constantly asking ourselves: ‘How can we best serve our members?’ That’s been, and will continue to be in the future, the vision of Anne-Marie Corboy and is reflected in the creation of this role,” she says.
HESTA also has an in-house compliance manager, Catherine McMahon, who is responsible for any day-to-day compliance issues for the fund.
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