spotlight

28 Superfunds May 2015

Cracking the ice with an oar in the black, pre-dawn stillness on the Charles River was as much a part of Ariane Barker’s Boston University education as her economics and mathematics degree.

The strikingly tall Emergency Services and State Super (ESSSuper) board member says she was recruited to row in her early days on the Boston campus “when my height was noticed”, and passed tryouts for a place in one of the university’s revered Terrier Rowing Eights, competing in the international Head of the Charles Regatta.

With characteristic dedication and focus, Ariane rose at 4am four or more mornings a week to train for two hours on the river, went off to university lectures, then clocked on at her part-time job with investment banker Bear Stearns, before returning to campus to study.

“I worked as much as I studied when I was at university, as I believe strongly in working hard and saving for what you want to achieve,” Barker says. “You learn a lot about yourself when you work at that level; you become very disciplined and focused.”

The middle child of an Austrian engineer and a French teacher, Barker had a peripatetic childhood, starting kindergarten in Paris, then attending schools in Boston, Philadelphia and Amsterdam with her sister and brother as her father moved from one project to another. She began her finance career in international capital markets with Merrill Lynch in New York in 1994. “It was a real trial by fire,” she says, “but I thrived and loved the technical depth I was able to achieve.”

Transferred to London, Hong Kong and Tokyo with Merrill Lynch, and later working in Asia for Goldman Sachs and HSBC, she helped manage a brokerage merger in Tokyo, and focused on capital markets in debt and equity, before moving to Melbourne with her Australian husband five years ago and turning her attention to superannuation. Appointed as a board member for ESSSuper in 2013, Barker finds her fiduciary responsibilities “immensely rewarding, satisfying and meaningful”.

“My role as an independent thinker on the ESSSuper Board is more fulfilling than investment banking, for I am effectively ensuring the safeguarding of assets of people who have a done a lifetime of hard work. In investment banking, you are not always given the full picture, and motivations for transactions are not always transparent. One of the things I find most gratifying in super is that we are all there for a similar purpose.”

Ariane Barker speaks to CAROLYN SWANSON about her

around-the-world journey from part-time investment

banking and pre-dawn rowing in the United States to

her “immensely rewarding” role on the Emergency

Services and State Super board in Australia.

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Superfunds May 2015 29Superfunds May 2015 29

spotlight

30 Superfunds May 2015

This high-achiever admits to some challenging “curveballs” presented by the inevitable intersection of her personal and professional lives. In a speech at a Women in Super networking breakfast at the ASFA Conference last year, she described how the context of our “personal stories” will always overlay our professional lives, recalling four particularly difficult years of juggling work with the eventual discovery that her first child was deaf and required appropriate intervention and treatment.

“I have always liked to be disciplined and focused in working towards specific goals. Until my daughter was born, it was more straightforward to achieve goals because they weren’t such a complex problem, but now I am careful about goal-setting, for it took until she was nearly four to get a proper diagnosis and then hearing aids.

“The experience of trying to get on with thriving, not surviving, while raising a child with a disability has helped me to put things in perspective about what is important and where I need to apply my energy and focus. Through that perspective, I found solutions and now my daughter is developing beautifully, so I can focus on my core strengths, while she gets on with hers.”

Barker’s core strengths involve identifying risk and facilitating complex financial decision-making at a board level. As well as her ESSSuper role, she sits on the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute Investment Committee and Development Board, and is a member of the Community Advisory Committee to Melbourne’s Royal Eye and Ear Hospital.

Confident in her early employer, Bear Sterns’, armour-plating as one of the world’s wealthiest securities firms, Barker was jolted ten years later to see JP Morgan Chase & Co buy the firm for less than a tenth of its value, followed by, only six months later, the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The global financial crisis (GFC) galvanised Barker to focus on risk: “a process of identifying and understanding risks, scrutinizing them then mitigating accordingly. The GFC showed us that the finance industry was not as safe as the public thought it was, but it led to its coming of age and a shift from one way of thinking to another.”

Preferring not to comment on the likelihood of another GFC, Barker instead likes to concentrate on strategies to mitigate exposure. She is passionate about promoting financial literacy and the need for rigour in saving for retirement. “There is no silver bullet; it is really being disciplined about saving throughout a working life and investing prudently. We are given messages about beachside lounge retirement, but we still have expenses and mortgages and we need to plan for that. If you can put something aside with every single pay check over a lifetime, you will reap the benefits of compound interest.”

After settling in Melbourne with her husband and their two daughters five years ago, Barker won an Australian Institute of Company Directors’ board diversity scholarship and selection as one of 70 high-potential, board-ready women, which contributed to her ESSSuper Board appointment.

Gratified by ESSSuper’s win as the top rated super fund for members’ financial satisfaction for 2014 by the Morgan Gallup poll, earning a satisfaction score of 81.3 per cent, well ahead of its nearest competitors; Catholic Super (72.7) and HESTA (65.4), Barker credits the fund’s success to ‘a well-governed investment policy

with a talented and dedicated management team and a strong relationship with our members’.

“Scale is of course a powerful factor,” Barker says of the SuperRatings five-star rated fund’s overall success, “particularly the ability to diversify and thus mitigate potential investment risks”.

As for her own success, she accepts that being a woman has affected her career prospects, but “no more so than my other qualities. As with many women working professionally, we must take the sum of our parts, gender being one of them”.

“Having worked across a range of markets and cultures, I don’t like differentiation by any difference in the corporate sphere, or even the fact we have to discuss diversity; we need to turn the conversation back to skills and working collaboratively. I believe in mutual respect and skills.”

The GFC showed us that

the finance industry was not as safe as the public

thought it was, but it led

to its coming of age and

a shift from one way of

thinking to another