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THE EXCHANGE

As head of BlackRock’s Canadian outpost, Marcia Moffat is helping push investors toward a more sustainable future—a shift that’s been sped up considerably by the pandemic

BY TREVOR COLE (2)

BlackRock Canada head Marcia Moffat on why COVID-19 has been good for sustainability and why Canada makes a good testing ground for new investment products

With office towers largely emptied thanks to pandemic protocols, the brain trusts of many large corporations are spread hither and yon. It hasn’t hurt the global investment behemoth BlackRock, which attracted a record inflow of US$172 billion in the first quarter of this year. These days, Marcia Moffat, head of BlackRock’s Canadian division, conducts her business far from Toronto’s financial hub, connecting with clients (and the roughly 100 employees responsible for the division’s US$217 billion in assets under management) between hikes with her two teenage children and young black Lab along the woody trails surrounding Collingwood, Ont. Could that be one reason Moffat is keen to talk about the investment world’s growing shift to climate-driven initiatives? No—it’s probably the money.

Have you sensed a change in how Canadians are investing because of the pandemic?

You’d heard for a lot of years about the death of active management. If anything, this pandemic environment has proven the importance of active management, because the markets have swung in different directions, and there have been some tectonic shifts, some acceleration of technological and other structural trends. And then there have been some shifts in terms of different sectors being under further pressure and other ones popping up. We had been having a lot of conversations with clients around sustainability heading into this. You think the foot will come off the pedal because of the crisis. Actually, we went in the other direction. There’s a fundamental shift in the market. We had a session with clients featuring Bill Gates and Larry Fink (1) talking about sustainability, and then Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, and the CEO of Rivian, R.J. Scaringe.

And it was our most wellattended event ever.

Interesting. We’ll get into the sustainability stuff in more detail a little later.

The other thing on investing I would say is the whole notion around construction of the portfolio, as opposed to stock picking—you know, asset allocations. What are the macro trends and so on. That’s a big theme, and that’s where our sophisticated clients really lean.

When you say “sophisticated clients,” you mean…

Think of us as a B2B type of model. We have an institutional client business. Our clients for that business are pension funds, insurance companies, family offices, foundations, endowments, some of the other asset managers on a sub-advised basis, and so on. And then our other big pillar in Canada is our exchange-traded fund business through the iShares franchise. The clients for that tend to be those institutional clients I mentioned, as well as financial advisers, and then individual investors buy them, too.

BlackRock is in at least 30 countries. That should give you perspective. How would you characterize Canadian

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2021-05-29T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-05-29T07:00:00.0000000Z

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