Esgaia is happy to announce the hire of Johanna Milne as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO). Johanna brings a wealth of knowledge and experience and will help strengthen Esgaia’s position as the leading platform for investment stewardship data management globally. She will focus on driving Esgaia’s commercial strategy, including revenue generation, business growth, and enabling partnerships.
Here follows a short profile and interview with Johanna.
Q: Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your background in finance and sustainability.
I have been working with institutional investors since the early 00’s with everything from venture capital, proxy voting, index provision, ESG data and consulting services. I have had a rather diverse career (nice way to say I have done lots of different things) with two stints at ISS for example, many years with Mercer and its Investment Consulting practice and a few corporate roles in between. This has given me an insight into company-investor dialogue as well as how everything from a small pension fund to a large global investor handles KPI’s and transformative change in terms of reaching targets both from a financial and sustainability perspective. I believe my breadth of experience will be useful to Esgaia and I look forward to working within a smaller, more agile organisation.
Q: Why were you interested in joining Esgaia?
I first came into contact with Esgaia in 2021 and felt even then that investor stewardship data management was an interesting focus - being a responsible steward of capital has been, is and will continue to grow in importance. However, without a structured approach, engagement dialogue is just discussions without a goal and often with no tangible results.
By combining in-house dialogue, engagements by service providers and collaborative efforts with other data such as voting behaviour and ESG research, investors can achieve a more robust and structured process. Couple this with increasing reporting requirements and the quest to showcase your competitive advantage and the tracking of objectives and activities through to outcomes becomes key.
Following on above, in my recent role at PwC I headed up the ESG data and tech offering, which saw a growing interest from both companies and investors. Now is really the time companies are starting to report more consistently as well as setting targets and measures for their organisations. Learning how to better utilise this information in the engagement process will allow more in-depth discussions and more concrete change. With growing stewardship capacity amongst investors, through dedicated ESG teams and up-skilling of investment departments, I feel the importance of empowering technology and data management structures is key.
Q: What do you hope to achieve in your role as CCO?
I hope to grow Esgaia at a faster pace whilst ensuring we continue to develop our solution. The development knowledge here is very high and I hope that through clients, a listening sales process, and partnerships, we can grow faster and smarter. Personally, I love problem-solving, with Esgaia’s modern and flexible platform I feel we can build a system that helps solve investor pain points, ensures happy clients, and a long-term sustainable Esgaia!