The chief executive of the Principle of Responsible Investment (PRI), Fiona Reynolds, has stepped down from the role after nine years.
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Reynolds will stay on until next year during the search for her successor, and relocate from London to her home country of Australia.
During her time at PRI, a United Nations-backed organisation that works to weave environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into financial decision-making, signatories to the principles have quadrupled, to 4,000, as responsible investment has shifted from a niche activity into the mainstream of the global financial industry, Reynolds said in a blog post on Monday.
She joined PRI in 2013 from the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees, where she was chief executive. She will move on after the completion of PRI’s three-year strategy to further integrate ESG factors into financial risk and real-world outcomes.
Reynolds said: “Spending nearly a decade in London, so far away from my home in Australia, has been deeply challenging on a personal level. The Covid-19 pandemic has made this more difficult in many ways, particularly with the ongoing closure of borders, and so has hastened my decision. The trade-offs of not being able to spend time with my family, or even being able to reach them if I needed, have simply become too high for me.”
Reynolds said that she would have stayed on as CEO from Australia if it was “viable”.
She added in a LinkedIn post that in a future role she intends to “continue to contribute to a world that is sustainable, just and climate aligned with net zero.”
“As you know Australia isn’t actually a leading light on some of these issues and I am going to take all the experience I have gained over the last decade and give it a nudge!” she said.
