Daily Archives: September 29, 2021

Alan Steel, investment advisor known for his straight-talking about the financial industry

Died: September 15, 2021

Alan Steel, who has died aged 74, was an investment advisor known for his straight-talking about the financial industry. He was the first person in the industry to expose the Equitable Life scandal and was also highly critical of any products he considered poor value for money, including endowment mortgages and with-profits bonds.

For most of his career, he ran his own company Alan Steel Asset Management, which he set up in his hometown of Linlithgow in 1975. Three times voted the best investment IFA in UK-wide industry polling, the firm today employs 41 staff managing more than 1.5 billion of client assets.

Born in Boness, West Lothian, to Alan Steel, a bricklayer, and Laura, a bookkeeper in a solicitors office, the family moved to Linlithgow when Alan was six. He attended primary school there followed by Linlithgow Academy.

After leaving school, he studied geography at Edinburgh University before training as an actuary with Scottish Widows but it was not for him. In his own words he discovered that he had a personality. And so he launched his asset management business at a time when practically no one else did.

The UK stock market at the time had reached an all-time low that it has never seen since and it was a period when new investors were very few and far between. Undaunted, he moved into an office space given to him by his old Linlithgow Academy school friend and former Hearts and Scotland footballer, Donald Ford. Donald had an accountancy practice in Linlithgow High Street at the time.

Alan set about building a personal bank of industry and investment technical knowledge by immersing himself in business books to give himself a competitive edge. This thirst for knowledge never left him and inspired many of the articles that he wrote regularly for the financial press. This increased knowledge, allied to his original actuarial training, ensured that he better understood and identified the flaws in the technicalities behind some of the financial scandals of the 80s and 90s long before they reached the attention of the media.

Alan was also driven to expose these scandals to a much wider audience, one which was way beyond his own customer base. He was the first person in the industry to expose the huge Equitable Life scandal and the first to shout down the poor value represented by endowment mortgages.

He went on to expose the smoke and mirrors that would eventually lead to the poor performance of one of the industrys then bestselling investment products, the with-profits bond. And his affinity for maths enabled him to publicly challenge the workings of the split capital investment trust, workings that subsequently proved to be totally flawed

The financial scandals now recognised as amongst the biggest of all time. It is therefore to Alans enormous credit that he challenged them all in public before anyone else.

Alans media crusades often created dangerous enemies for him amongst the big financial institutions but despite threatened court action against him Alans constant pursuit of customer protection remained undaunted.

He became a regular commentator in all the UK financial press and broadcast media where he always put his points across in a language all readers, viewers and listeners could understand.

Those who were privileged to receive copies of his regular Letter from Linlithgow each month would laugh out loud at his writing, especially when he often referenced his Grannie McKays sayings to make an important point.

He was very much in demand as an after-dinner speaker and proudly claimed to be the only individual ever to give the main speech in the same year at the two significant historical events that were local and always very dear to him, the Linlithgow Marches and the Boness Fair.

When asked what his life was like outside financial services, he would simply say family, music, my moothie , Ibiza , red wine and Oliphants pies. Oliphants was his local Linlithgow baker.

His longstanding friend and fellow Linlithgow financial services stalwart John Allison said of Alan that he was successful and innovative in business but still humble. He was kind, loyal, generous, honest and a thoroughly decent man, said John.

Alan always remained totally true to his working-class upbringing. But, unknown to most, he was also a significant financial benefactor and quietly, behind the scenes, he gave great financial support to many local institutions and events.

Steve Forbes, who has been managing director of ASAM since 2005, said he and his colleagues were always impressed by his vast technical knowledge, the camaraderie of his staff and, his sense of humour.

Together we wanted to help him try to make his dream of retirement financial independence for Alan Steel Asset Management clients come true, said Steve, He was a one off and a genius, of that there is certainly no doubt, but he was also a great visionary. Several years ago, he deliberately stood back from the day to day running of the business and assumed the role of company chairman. He couldnt keep away from the office, of course, and each visit was always a breath of fresh air.

His sudden passing has certainly hit us all very hard, but we take great comfort from the fact that his corporate vision and DNA are forever installed in all of us here in Linlithgow. Upholding these ideals now and well into the future will be our lasting tribute to a truly unique individual.

Alan Steel is survived by his wife Fran, son Malcolm and daughter Catherine together with son in law Dylan and daughter in law Helen and his five grandchildren, Hannah, Cameron, Jackson, Frankton and Daisy.

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Obituary - Alan Steel, investment advisor known for his straight-talking about the financial industry - HeraldScotland

YOUR first job is a rite of passage. I remember mine 15 or 16 years old, long hair tied back in a ponytail, serving customers in the caf of a local department store.

The work was hardly backbreaking, but I remember feeling real pride when I got my first payslip. It was proof I finally had some financial independence. Money in the bank I could truly say Id earned.

It would have been a tiny amount all in all. I was only working weekend shifts on the lowest band of the Minimum Wage. And as I got older and moved out, I definitely remember the purchasing power of my wages dropping. Costs went up but the money stayed the same, and so the wage slips felt less significant, less able to cover anything but the basics each month.

That picture will be familiar to many. At Citizens Advice Scotland we are constantly helping people in low paid work to keep their heads above water.

But we also help people with other serious employment issues, like illegal deductions from wages, false redundancies, and discrimination and harassment that far too many workers face. In the last year alone, employment advice was the third biggest need for the network almost 175,000 pieces of advice in total.

Earlier this year, the Low Pay Commission the body set up to advise the UK Government on setting the national minimum wage opened its annual consultation on the state of the UK labour market, and we fed in many of our clients stories to help the Government understand the difficulties workers face every day.

There are some truly shocking cases in our response. Weve seen staff sacked en masse and replaced with a new workforce when restrictions lifted. Weve seen clients made redundant via text message, with no notice, process, or final pay. Weve seen large chain employers refuse to furlough staff on the grounds that the National Insurance contributions would cost too much, leaving them with no income.

People have really suffered over the past year and we know many more will have stayed quiet, thankful to have a job at all.

Problems with furlough were common. CAB clients reported having furlough payments deducted or paid inconsistently, with employers claiming more hours than they were paying out. One client was even told he had to make up his furlough pay, being expected to work 360 hours unpaid to make back time lost to furlough. Its a total abuse of the scheme, and its always the worker who loses out.

But beneath pandemic-specific issues were the standard employment rights breaches that have sadly become normal. Deductions from wages that take them below the legal minimum; clients whose employers refuse them statutory sick pay; even basic rights like receiving a payslip at the end of the month time and again people are denied their most basic rights at work. One case that sticks in my mind was a client who worked as a frontline courier during the pandemic. As his contract said he was self-employed, he had to pay hire fees for the company van he was required to use to do his job. But after an accident at work damaged the bumper of the van, the company attempted to charge him more than 1,000 for repairs (his local CAB eventually negotiated this down to 200). On top of that, he was left unable to work for six weeks, with no income or support from the courier company. These arrangements are growing more and more common, but theyd have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

With this in mind, its encouraging to see the UK Government again committing to improving the enforcement of workers rights with the creation of a single specialist enforcement body. But lets also be clear: the Government has been dragging its feet on this. Plans for a single enforcement body were first announced in 2019 and weve seen little progress since then. People need their rights protected now.

There are two things the Government could do to help the lowest paid workers immediately.

First, the Government should provide additional funding to the HMRCs existing compliance team, to encourage it to go after rogue employers who trample on workers rights. Our CAB advisers tell us that, despite the legal powers available to it, the compliance team carry out almost no proactive investigations at present. The Government should explore options to strengthen the HMRCs hand until the new single enforcement body can be established.

Second, the Government should work to protect peoples incomes as we recover from the pandemic. The furlough scheme, which continues to be a lifeline for around 115,000 Scots, is set to end. Those people need the peace of mind that their incomes will be protected should they lose their jobs.

That also means that the Government must cancel the planned cut to Universal Credit (UC).

Remember that UC is not only for the unemployed: over 180,000 people on UC in Scotland are in work. Cutting UC will harm their incomes and even risk pushing them off UC altogether, meaning their entitlement to other passported benefits like the Scottish Child Payment will also end. For some working families, that will mean an overnight income drop of 30 or 40 a week a huge shock for anyone, never mind those on the lowest wages.

It feels like were finally coming out of the long last year. Shops and bars are reopening, and many of us are returning to work. But the last thing our economy needs is falling incomes and mass unemployment. For that recovery to stick, we must protect the lowest paid.

David Scott works in the Social Justice policy team at Citizens Advice Scotland.

Originally posted here:

Protecting the lowest paid must be key to economic recovery - HeraldScotland

Patience isn't just a virtue. On Wall Street, it's a formula for building wealth. Despite the broad-based S&P 500 declining by a double-digit percentage on 38 separate occasions since the beginning of 1950, each and every one of these pullbacks was eventually erased by a bull-market rally.

Put in another context, it really doesn't matter when you put your money to work in stocks. The more important aspect is how long you hold onto your investments. History shows that the longer you hold, the greater your chance of generating life-altering returns.

Best of all, with most online brokerages eliminating commissions and minimum deposit requirements, any amount of capital -- even $200 -- can go a long way toward achieving your financial independence.

If you have $200 ready to invest, which won't be needed for bills or emergencies, it can be put to work in this trio of no-brainer stocks right now.

Image source: Getty Images.

Although growth stocks have ruled the roost on Wall Street for the better part of 12 years, it's value stock Bristol Myers Squibb (NYSE:BMY) that stands out as a jaw-dropping, no-brainer buy at the moment.

The great thing about healthcare stocks like Bristol Myers Squibb is they're money machines in any economic environment. Since we don't get the control when we get sick or what ailment(s) we develop, demand for things like drugs, devices, and healthcare services doesn't change just because Wall Street had a bad day or the U.S. economy enters a recession. Operating in a defensive sector means pharmaceutical stocks like Bristol Myers are veritable cash cows.

As you might imagine, internal development has played a big role in lifting sales for the company. For instance, it's on track to generate north of $10 billion in sales from Eliquis, which was developed in cooperation with Pfizer. Eliquis has quickly become the world's leading oral anticoagulant.

There's also cancer immunotherapy Opdivo, which brought in about $7 billion in sales in 2020. Opdivo has 10 approved indications, but it's being studied in dozens of clinical trials as a monotherapy or combination treatments. While not all of these trials will pan out, label expansions are likely over time. This should expand Opdivo's sales potential, lift Bristol Myers' pricing power on the drug, and further insulate its cash flow from future competition.

Bristol Myers Squibb further solidified itself as a great company with its late 2019 acquisition of cancer and immunology company Celgene. This deal added multiple myeloma drug Revlimid into Bristol Myers' portfolio. This is a drug that brought in more than $12 billion in sales last year, and that's grown by a double-digit annual percentage for over a decade. Revlimid is protected from a full onslaught of generic competition until Jan. 31, 2026, which means years of exceptional cash flow still to come.

There's no reason investors should be able to buy this company for just 7.4 times forward-year earnings, and with a 3.3% yield.

Image source: Getty Images.

If high-growth small-cap stocks are what wet your whistle, cannabis company Planet 13 Holdings (OTC:PLNH.F) is a no-brainer stock just begging to be bought.

It's no lie that marijuana stocks have been nothing short of a buzzkill the past seven months. Shortly after President Joe Biden took office, the expectation was that cannabis reform could actually happen at the federal level. But nearly a year after the election, change still hasn't come to Capitol Hill.

However, what's being overlooked is the fact that 36 states have legalized medical marijuana in some capacity, with half of those states having rules on their books to allow (or eventually allow) recreational consumption and/or retail sales. With the U.S. Justice Department allowing states to regulate their own pot industries, companies like Planet 13 have more than enough avenues to thrive.

Planet 13 is a multistate operator (MSO), but it's absolutely nothing like the other U.S. MSOs. Rather than opening dozens of stores in as many legalized states as possible, Planet 13 has focused on the experience of shopping for cannabis.

It has two operating dispensaries at the moment. Its original location is the SuperStore in Las Vegas, just west of the Strip. This is a 112,000-square-foot store that features a consumer-facing processing center, events stage, caf, and more selling space than you can ever imagine for dried flower, paraphernalia, and derivatives. The other SuperStore is located in Santa Ana, Calif., and will span 55,000 when fully complete. It currently has 16,500 square feet of selling space. No other dispensary comes close to the experience or layout Planet 13 offers its guests.

With the Las Vegas SuperStore a success, Planet 13 is setting its sights on Chicago, where it was recently awarded a license, and Florida, where it's acquiring a cannabis license from Harvest Health & Recreation. Both markets are magnets for tourists, and they're already generating more than $1 billion in annual weed sales. With the company turning the corner to recurring profitability, these new locations could cement Planet 13 as a premier pot stock.

Image source: Getty Images.

A third no-brainer buy with $200 right now is storage solutions giant Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC). If you thought Bristol Myers was cheap at 7.4 times forward-year earnings, Western Digital can be had for less than 4.9 times Wall Street's consensus forward-year earnings.

Traditionally, storage is a highly cyclical and commoditized industry. That's why you'll occasionally see Western Digital valued at a single-digit price-to-earnings ratio. Analysts simply assume that storage providers will increase their output to take advantage of higher prices and oversupply the market, eventually leading to a move lower in prices and profitability. But things could be different this go-around -- especially with the pandemic wreaking havoc on global supply chains.

As I've noted in the past, Western Digital is perfectly positioned to benefit from the gaming console replacement cycle. New gaming consoles typically hit the market every five years. The launch of new consoles last November, and the increased storage capacity needed to operate these next-gen consoles, should provide a healthy short-term bump for Western Digital.

Also helping out in the short run are higher sales for notebooks and personal computers. With the pandemic keeping people in their homes and workforces going remote, demand for notebooks and PCs have soared.

But it's the company's long-term catalysts that could send shares markedly higher. I'm talking about Western Digital's role in providing storage capacity for data centers as businesses shift their data into the cloud. It's quite possible that the company's NAND flash solutions become the preferred storage option in data centers by as soon as mid-decade.

The company will also benefit from the next-generation vehicle replacement cycle. New vehicles, including electric vehicles, are more reliant on storage solutions than ever to operate entertainment systems and other dashboard components.

The point is that Western Digital has more going for it now than at any other time that I can remember in my more than two decades of investing.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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3 No-Brainer Stocks to Invest $200 In Right Now - The Motley Fool

Over the summer, my three years of dorm life finally came to an end. Finally, I signed a lease with a friend and moved into my first ever apartment for my last year of college. It was an exciting beginning to a new chapter in my life. After all, I always knew eventually I would have to move out of my family home for the last time to continue adulthood on my own.

My new Allston apartment was the beginning of that journey. It marked my first step towards achieving independence, and it meant I avoided the archetype of the post-college, do-nothing loser living in their moms basement. Id never have to live with my parents again, right?

According to Pew Research Center, more than half of young adults were living with one or more parents in July 2020. Considering those of us currently marinating in the comfort-zone of academia are graduating into a world recovering from economic collapse, as the job market continues to be competitive and the wealth gap continues to increase, the luxury of independence is becoming harder and harder to achieve.

The daunting reality is this: many of us graduating in the next few years may have to move back home.

Despite this increasingly becoming the reality for millennials and zoomers, the stigma surrounding moving back home is still real. Anecdotally, I can say many people in my circle are trying to avoid having to live with their parents at all costs myself included. So, its important to ask ourselves why there is such an emphasis on home-ownership.

Part of what makes living far from home so appealing to young Americans is the cultural emphasis on financial independence. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University theorized that wealth creation, residential stability and a sense of control are three major factors that contribute to the desire for home-ownership. These traits are shared with the mythologized American Dream that promises prosperity in exchange for working hard.

Which is to say, for those whove internalized that narrative that working hard means accumulating wealth the contrapositive must also be true: if you lack wealth it means you havent worked hard enough to earn it. So, when we see people with college degrees houseless, living at home with their parents, we assume they must be lazy and irresponsible.

It is easy to fantasize that I will be financially independent after I graduate by overworking myself. But when economic collapses like recessions occur more and more frequently, and the cost of living increases as wages remain stagnant, that becomes harder to justify.

Although home-ownership is perceived to be a sign of upward mobility, the truth is there are only so many seats at the top. Many Americans cant afford the luxury of home-ownership, and many of us graduating in the next couple of years may find ourselves in the same boat. When we internalize that how much wealth we accumulate correlates to how hard we work, were reinforcing a classist ideology that hurts not just others but ourselves.

If Im going to cope with the fact that my path towards success may not follow American tradition, I may as well do so in my childhood bedroom.

Originally posted here:

Sincerely, Ally: Why is there a stigma of living with your parents? The Daily Free Press - Daily Free Press

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For 15 years, Yvette Dessin spent long workdays with her elderly patients, accompanying them on walks, cooking them meals and bathing those who needed that most intimate kind of care. If a patient died, Dessin and her adult daughter attended the funeral services to pay their respects.

Dessin worked up to 60 hours a week as a home health aide, her daughter said, making minimum wage. She often worried about being able to pay the mortgage on her Queens, New York, home. She was one of roughly 2.4 million home care workers in the United States most of them low-income women of color and many of them immigrants who assist elderly or disabled patients in private residences or group homes.

The industry is in the midst of enormous growth. By 2030, 21% of the U.S. population will be at the retirement age, up from 15% in 2014, and older adults have long been moving away from institutionalized care. In a 2018 AARP survey, 76% of those age 50 and older said they preferred to remain in their current residence as they age. In 2019, national spending on home health care reached a high of $113.5 billion, a 40% increase from 2013, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The ranks of home care aides are expected to grow by more than those of any other job in the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is also among the lowest-paying occupations on the list.

Nearly 1 in 5 aides lives below the poverty line. In six states, the average hourly wage for home care aides is less than $11, and nationally, the median pay has increased just $1.75 an hour over the past decade, when adjusted for inflation.

Much of the aides low wages are paid for with taxpayer dollars about two-thirds of home care revenue is through public programs, primarily Medicaid, according to the nonprofit PHI, which monitors the eldercare workforce. The state and the federal government and sometimes the local municipality split the cost of Medicaid, which makes for varying rules from state to state, including on what services home health aides can provide.

The pandemic only made things worse, exposing the vulnerability not only of the elderly and infirm but also of those who care for them. As COVID-19 spread across the country, many families turned to home health care as an alternative to nursing homes, which had become hot spots for the virus. Shortages of personal protective equipment made the work risky.

Although home health aides qualify for sick leave under New York City law, many people interviewed were unaware of that or did not feel as if they were truly permitted to take time off.

In conversations with more than 50 home health aides around the country, many workers described unpaid or late-paid wages, unaffordable benefits and chronic injuries.

For some, like Dessin, those conditions amid a pandemic proved fatal. She was at high risk because of her age and preexisting conditions and became one of at least 275 aides at her company who contracted the virus, according to her union. Her company said she was one of seven of its employees to die from COVID-19.

Dessins daughter, Dany St. Laurent, believes that her mother felt trapped during the pandemic. Her work came before everything, she said. Including herself.

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Private work, public regulation

Americare, Dessins employer, is one of about 1,500 home health care providers in New York state, and among the citys largest, with more than 5,000 employees and about as many patients in the five boroughs and surrounding counties.

The private nature of the work makes oversight of home care agencies challenging, even when regulators try to step in.

In 2018, an investigation by the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection found that Americare was among more than 30 home care agencies that had failed to follow paid sick leave regulations. It determined that Americares sick time policies violated city law and noted that the company had a history of noncompliance with labor laws. The company was ordered to change its policies, notify employees of their rights and train managers on complying with city sick leave law.

The company is also the subject of a lawsuit by workers claiming a systemic, long-standing underpayment of wages going back to 2005. In court documents, Americare denied the accusations. Oral arguments regarding the workers motion for the case to proceed as a class action are scheduled to begin later this year.

Americare was investigated twice by the attorney generals office for Medicaid compliance issues in 2005 for improper billing and in 2008 for failing to detect workers with falsified training certificates. The investigations resulted in a total of $15 million in reimbursements.

In an interview, an Americare representative said that Medicaid audit settlements were common in the industry.

There are an estimated 65,000 home care agencies across the country. Americare may have a fraught history, but it is also a microcosm for the industry itself.

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Doing what she loved

When Dessin moved to New York from Haiti in the mid-1980s, she realized that the unpaid caregiving work she had been doing in her home country was a marketable skill.

Speaking nine months after her mothers death, St. Laurent described how life in New York looked from Haiti as if money grows on trees, she told us last winter. From what theyve seen on the internet, you could just go in the garden and pick up $100.

For almost two decades, Dessin ran a day care center out of her apartment. In 2005, at 50 years old, she decided to pursue a home health aide certification. When she completed the training program that fall, she had her certificate framed.

This lure of education and financial independence also drew Helen Monah, a Guyanese immigrant who moved to New York City in 2018 and began home health care training. She texted her daughter, Rubena Durbin, photos of her progress a stack of open textbooks and pictures of herself in glasses and scrubs. In December, she was hired by Americare.

She was so happy to be working in that environment doing what she loved, Durbin said.

The work itself was onerous. Apart from regular patient care, Americare home health aides are also required to provide light housekeeping, including washing toilets, removing garbage and dusting, according to an employee handbook obtained during the citys 2018 investigation.

It also puts aides in close contact with their clients. They often have to lift and lower their patients, with their bodies pressed together and faces inches apart.

An Americare executive acknowledged that early in the pandemic, personal protective equipment was in short supply, so the company gave priority to workers assigned to high-risk patients. The executive said that the company distributed information in multiple languages on how workers could protect themselves and that workers were permitted to use paid time off as needed, adding that at one point in April 2020, as many as 250 aides were quarantining.

Numerous Americare nurses, therapists and aides said they would not be able to work due to their own underlying conditions, family concerns or general anxiety decisions that weve honored and respected, said Gallagher, Americares vice president.

As of August 2021, at least 275 Americare aides had been infected with COVID-19, according to Francine Streich, a field director at United Food and Commercial Workers Local 2013, the union representing Americare workers. She noted, though, that the number was probably an undercount, as the company had stopped providing numbers of cases to the union. Americare said that number was accurate as of February; it did not provide an updated number.

As the pandemic began spreading through the city, St. Laurent and Durbin both tried to persuade their mothers to quit. But their paychecks helped them achieve the financial independence both women had yearned for for most of their lives.

Dessin spent March 2020 working as many hours as possible 40 hours a week from Americare and more from another company. Later that month, she came home from work exhausted.

Mom, stay home, call out sick, her daughter, St. Laurent, pleaded, as Dessin sat down to catch her breath on the couch.

But Dessin was only five months away from when she had planned to retire and decided to keep working. Several days later, her condition had worsened. Dessin struggled to walk and needed her daughter to wash her hair as she sat on a chair in the bathtub.

The next day, St. Laurent drove her mother to the hospital. She was put on a ventilator that same night. Four days later, on April 7, Dessin was gone.

Meanwhile, Monah had bought a ticket back to Guyana for her sons wedding, her first visit in four years. After this trip, she told her daughter, maybe she would go on a cruise. Once she got to New York and started making her own money, she wanted to live, Durbin said.

Durbin was concerned when her mother told her that an aide who had worked a shift before her at a patients house was coughing, but Monah assured her daughter that she had cleaned the area with supplies she bought with her own money.

By April, she, too, had become ill and was treating her flulike symptoms with home remedies and over-the-counter medicines. On April 11, she began experiencing acute pain in her legs and stomach.

At the hospital, doctors diagnosed a blood clot in her stomach related to COVID-19 and recommended surgery. She sent her daughter a voice note via WhatsApp. Im going to make it, she said through fits of raspy coughing. Im a fighter.

But Monah never woke up, and on April 26 three weeks after Dessins death she, too, died.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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Home care workers feel stressed and alone - Finance and Commerce

Nearly 50 years after Katherine Graham of The Washington Post became the first-ever woman to run a Fortune 500 company, just 8% of Americas largest companies have female CEOs.

Indra Nooyi, the former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo who pushed for transformational change at the company through innovation of healthier products, once belonged to that small club.

In a new memoir called My Life in Full: Work, Family and our Future, Nooyi reflects on her career and the challenge of balancing work and family. Click the audio player above to hear Nooyis conversation with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal. The following is an excerpt from the book.

One foggy Tuesday in November 2009, after hours of meetings in Washington, DC, with two dozen top US and Indian business executives, I found myself standing between the president of the United States and the prime minister of India.

Barack Obama and Manmohan Singh had entered the room for an update on our groups progress, and President Obama began introducing the American team to his Indian counterpart. When he got to me Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo Prime Minister Singh exclaimed, Oh! But she is one of us!

And the president, with a big smile and without missing a beat, responded, Ah, but she is one of us, too!

Its a moment Ill never forget spontaneous kindness from the leaders of the two great countries that have given me so much. I am still the girl who grew up in a close family in Madras, in the South of India, and I am deeply connected to the lessons and culture of my youth. I am also the woman who arrived in the US at age twenty-three to study and work and, somehow, rose to lead an iconic company, a journey that I believe is possible only in America. I belong in both worlds.

Looking back, I see how my life is full of this kind of duality competing forces that have pushed and pulled me from one chapter to another. And I see how this is true of everyone. We are all balancing, juggling, compromising, doing our best to find our place, move ahead, and manage our relationships and responsibilities. Its not easy in a society that changes very fast yet sticks to some age-old habits and rules of behavior that feel out of our control.

The twin demands that define me have always been my family and my work. I joined PepsiCo, in 1994, in part because the companys headquarters were close to my house. I had two daughters, ages ten and one-and-a-half at the time, and a husband whose office was nearby. PepsiCos job offer made sense, we thought, because the commute was short. Id be able to drive to the school or home to the baby in fifteen minutes. Of course, this is not the only reason I chose PepsiCo, an exuberant, optimistic company that I whole-heartedly enjoyed from the moment I walked in. I also felt that PepsiCo was a place that was open to changing with the times.

That was important. I was female, an immigrant, and a person of color entering an executive floor where I was different from everyone else. My career had started when the dynamics between women and men at work were not the same as they are now. In fourteen years as a consultant and corporate strategist, I had never had a woman boss. I had no female mentors. I wasnt upset when I was excluded from the customs of male power; I was just happy to be included at all. But by the time I got to PepsiCo, waves of educated, ambitious women were pouring into the workforce, and I could sense the atmosphere changing. The competition between men and women was becoming more acute, and, in the subsequent decades, women have altered the game in ways that would have been unthinkable to me early on. As a business leader, I always tried to anticipate and respond to the shifting culture. As a woman and the mother of girls, I wanted to do everything possible to encourage it.

As my career progressed, and my children grew up, I wrestled with the ever present conflicts of working motherhood. For fifteen years, I kept a whiteboard in my office that only my daughters could write on or erase. Over time, that board was a comforting kaleidoscope of doodles and messages, a constant reminder of the people closest to me and those to whom I really belong. When I moved out of my office, I kept a canvas replica of its last iteration: Hey Mom, I love you very, very much. XOXOXOX. Hang in there. Never forget that you have people that love you! Have a great day! Hey Mom, you are the absolute best! Keep doing what you are doing! the image exclaims, with cartoon characters and pictures of suns and clouds, all in green and blue dry-erase marker.

As a high profile female CEO, I was also asked over and over to discuss work and family conflicts in front of large audiences. I once commented that I wasnt sure my daughters thought I was a good mother dont all moms feel that way sometimes? and an Indian TV network produced a full hour prime time discussion program, without me, on what Indra Nooyi said about working women.

The twin demands that define me have always been my family and my work.

Over the years, I met thousands of people worried about how to be true to their families, their jobs, and their ambitions to be good citizens. This engagement had a great impact on me; I learned and absorbed the details at a visceral level. I thought about how family is such a powerful source of human strength but realized that creating and nurturing families is a source of stress for so many.

At the same time, I was among a vaunted group of global leaders regularly invited into rooms with the most influential leaders on the planet. And I came to notice that the painful stories about how people especially women struggle to blend their lives and were entirely absent in those rooms. The titans of industry, politics, and economics talked about advancing the world through finance, technology, and flying to Mars. Family the actual messy, delightful, difficult, and treasured core of how most of us live was fringe.

This disconnect has profound consequences. Our failure to address work and family pressures in the senior reaches of global decision making restrains hundreds of millions of women every day, not only from rising and leading, but also from blending a satisfying career with a healthy partnership and motherhood. In a prosperous marketplace, we need all women to have the choice to work in paid jobs outside the home and for our social and economic infrastructure to entirely support that choice. Womens financial independence and security, so central to their equality, are at stake.

More broadly, ignoring the fact that the work world is still largely skewed toward the ideal worker of yore an unencumbered male breadwinner depletes us all. Men, too. Companies lose out because productivity, innovation, and profit suffer when so many employees feel they cant bring their whole selves to work. Families lose out because they spend so much energy coping with old systems, from short school hours to a lack of parental leave or elder care, that dont mesh with their reality.

And, of course, the entire global community suffers. Many young people, worried about how they will manage it all, are choosing not to have children. This could not only have dire economic consequences in the decades to come, but, on a very personal note, I find this detail sad. With everything I have accomplished, my greatest joy was having children, and I wouldnt want anyone to miss the experience if they want it.

Ignoring the fact that the work world is still largely skewed toward the ideal worker ofyore an unencumbered male breadwinner depletes us all.

I believe that we must address the work and family conundrum by focusing on our infrastructure around care with an energy and ingenuity like never before. We should consider this a moonshot, starting with ensuring that every worker has access to paid leave, flexibility, and predictability to help them handle the ebb and flow of work and family life, and then moving fast to develop the most innovative and comprehensive childcare and eldercare solutions that our greatest minds can devise.

This mission will require leadership that we dont often see. I think the fundamental role of a leader is to look for ways to shape the decades ahead, not just react to the present, and to help others accept the discomfort of disruptions to the status quo. We need the wisdom of business leaders, policy makers, and all women and men passionate about easing the work and family burden to come together here. With a can-do sense of optimism and a must-do sense of responsibility, we can transform our society.

Transformation is difficult, but I have learned that with courage and persistence and the inevitable give and take it can happen. When I became PepsiCos CEO, in 2006, I laid out an extremely ambitious plan to address the underlying tensions in a company still rooted in selling soda and chips. I knew we had to balance supporting our prizedPepsi-Cola and Doritos brands with afull throttle effort to make and market more healthy products. We had to keep stocking stores and pantries with convenient, delicious snacks and beverages but account for the environmental impact of that growth. We had to attract and retain the very best thinkers in their fields but ensure that PepsiCo was also a terrific place to work for a quarter of a million people. I called this mission Performance with Purpose, and, for a dozen years, I weighed every decision against these measures, making constant trade offs to achieve a more sustainable, contemporary organization.

In the months before I left PepsiCo, in 2018, I thought about how I would contribute in the years ahead, knowing that I am one in a chain of woman leaders who can help move us forward for generations to come. I set out to write a book and insisted to all around me that it would not be a memoir. Instead, I thought, I would devote every ounce of my experience and intellect to a manual for fixing how we mix work and family.

The book you hold is not that book.

First, I soon found that the research on work and family has been done. From every angle, in every corner of the world, the arguments and ideas for supporting families from maternity leave to early childhood education to multigenerational living have been compiled, analyzed, scored, and debated by brilliant minds. I didnt need to repeat all that.

Second, everything I bring to this issue, I know now, comes from my own life in full.

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Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on the work and family conundrum - Marketplace

By Noah Kessler

After having evaluated the benefits, large financial institutions are embracing the cloud, resulting in its exponential growth in the industry. While the cloud delivers a raft of benefits, the pace of cloud adoption also has raised questions regarding the efficacy of risk management and compliance practices within CSPs. However, CSPs are well-positioned and highly experienced in practicing effective risk management. Mature and robust risk management practices and processes are embedded in every vertical and product line in leading CSPs.

Regulators, who regard CSPs as emerging technology organizations (in the same category as fintech and regtech companies), have been publishing guidance on the use of these various technology organizations and providers for nearly a decade. Until recently, however, the guidance has not been very detailed.

Ultimately, the burden of providing regulators with greater comfort regarding the use of CSPs rests with the regulated financial services industry. The challenge is to prove to the regulators that CSPs and the financial services firms that use them understand and have effective risk management.

As cloud adoption in the financial services industry has increased, regulators are becoming more knowledgeable about how firms are relying on CSPs without sacrificing the rigor required in risk management and compliance practices.

Financial regulators generally focus on risk issues related to the safety and soundness of an institution as well as protection for its customers. In their attention to those priorities, regulators increasingly recognize how CSPs are supporting the security controls of financial services organizations by enabling a complete, real-time inventory of assets and how they are protected.

Cloud technology directly addresses the security concerns of regulators and others while providing significant operating benefits. Moving data and services from a banks dedicated legacy infrastructure to a multi-tenant cloud environment, if properly configured, can provide additional layers of security for the institution and decrease its systemic risk.

CSPs are world-class experts in security and protection, with highly skilled teams dedicated to ensuring privacy and effective controls. Amid the surge in cyber-attacks in recent years, financial institutions understand the difficulty of achieving the scale of what CSPs are investing in security internally.

Through the greater processing capacity and power that CSPs deliver, financial services firms can release new cutting-edge technologies much faster. They can also save money by moving from a fixed-cost to a variable-cost basis.

Because they serve multiple customers, CSPs scale provides cost savings. CSPs use that scale to keep their systems on the cutting edge of technology, providing the latest in infrastructure and security. Financial services institutions, on the other hand, often are trapped in legacy architecture that can necessitate an inefficient use of computing power and data storage. Smaller banks, in particular, may lack the capacity to hire the highest-caliber technology resources or be able to convert to newer technologies.

Regulators have come to appreciate that the basket of risk for financial services organizations has shifted and, in many cases, diminished with the advent of CSP involvement. In particular, they note the benefits of end-to-end security and remain attentive to coordination of incident responses between CSPs and financial services institutions.

However, regulators have questions about the overall risk management approach and practices among CSPs, which tend to differ from that of financial institutions, with which regulators have a high level of familiarity.

Regulators and examiners need to consider whether the questions they ask of financial services institutions still make sense in the context of cloud-based services and whether they might have to modify some of these as their understanding expands.

A systemic relationship prevails between the banking community and CSPs. Just as with any third-party service provider, regulators recognize that if a CSP suffers a significant adverse event, a trickle-down effect could impact the banks.

CSPs robust risk management practices are evident when assessing them on operational resilience, risk controls, lines of defense, automation and innovation.

A critical component of risk management in financial services is operational resilience. Regulators have been very clear that operational resilience plans must account for firms material use of third-party providers.

Roles and responsibilities need to be delineated clearly between financial services institutions and the CSPs they usetypically referred to as a shared responsibility model. A clear contract that details the activities and obligations of each party is necessary. In the eyes of the regulators, any issue that arises ultimately is the responsibility of the financial institution.

CSPs cannot assess the criticality of a service for a financial institution. For example, a CSP wouldnt know if a workload is so significant that it underpins a banks payment system. The criticality rating must be relayed to the examiners by the financial institution.

Although every CSP with which a financial institution has a relationship is responsible for a piece of operational resilience, banks must apply that shared responsibility model to systems placed in the cloud. Additionally, interdependencies between services present potential risks. If there were an outage for one service, it might have downstream effects on others.

Resilience poses further questions. Regulators may ask how the bank deploys a resilient architecture for its workloads on the CSPs infrastructure. Regulators must understand the measures that the bank has taken to protect its resilience when parts of a CSPs infrastructure are not available.

Above all, using and relying on a CSP that provides resilient and fault-tolerant infrastructure and services does not mean that the financial institution has abdicated responsibility around resilience. Regardless of what CSP an organization is using, it is the responsibility of that organization to manage its own space within the cloud. Systems in the cloud that are not architected properly will not enjoy the benefit of the CSPs resilience advantages and could raise red flags for regulators.

Leading CSPs employ robust risk management and compliance practices comparable to those of financial institutions. They just do so with a different approach and model (bottom-up and top-down, or 360 degrees) compared to financial institutions (top-down). Regulators are far more familiar with the model employed by financial institutions.

Within CSPs, a pervading culture of ownership drives risk management. Although governance reporting flows to senior leadership, as expected by regulators in terms of oversight, service and product teams still retain a high amount of accountability.

In a belt-and-suspenders approach, executive management oversees the commonalities while each service is essentially treated as its own business unit. That independence provides the flexibility to develop processes and operations that best support the needs of each service. Although the chief information security officer puts in place security guardrails, these groups are empowered to do what makes the most sense for their products.

Typical dimensions of risk mitigation differences are illustrated in the following examples:

Architecture. CSPs anticipate failure of hardware and software by building in automated resilience; financial institutions focus on resilience through traditional disaster recovery sites, requiring human intervention.

Service delivery. CSPs conduct service requests via application programming interfaces; financial institutions conduct service requests via human workflow.

Operability. CSPs programmatic and automated operations require fewer human operators as demand increases; within financial institutions, human-intensive operations grow linearly with demand.

The shared responsibility model outlines certain aspects for which the CSP is responsible and others for which their clients are. For instance, while the CSP may provide an API for a customers access to storage devices, the CSP wont be responsible for the data the customer puts there. Its controls are intended to provide only virtual segmentation of the customers data and the physical environment networking around it, as well as to prevent attackers from accessing it through the CSPs network. It remains the role of the customer to protect access to that data through proper controls and encryption.

The three lines of defense modelmanagement/business line, risk and compliance oversight, and internal auditis an accepted framework in financial services and other industries. This model defines responsibilities for management, risk oversight and independent assurance. CSPs employ the same model:

First line. Product development teams create and manage cloud services. These teams are comparable to a banks business lines and they focus on areas like security practices, capacity and availability. Each is responsible for owning its risk activities, as well as for understanding how its function interacts with other services.

Second line. Compliance or security assurance groups, comparable to the risk or compliance function in a financial institution, are in place at CSPs. The second line governance reporting oversees the enforcement of the teams risk management at a detailed level. Second line staff in a CSP, who are typically engineers and security experts, provide continuous validation checks to ensure service teams are meeting a high bar for security and operational resilience. Other formal groups conduct penetration testing, security reviews and onboard services into different client programs.

Third line. A robust internal audit function in CSPs is comparable to the internal audit department in financial firms. Large customer audit teams operate within the CSP. To a greater extent than banks, they release dozens of assurance reports on a regular basis to provide evidence of their control posture. CSPs are also heavily audited by third parties in terms of their standards, controls and processes.

CSPs use advanced automation in their risk management and compliance practices, minimizing manual controls. That helps CSPs to provide services at scale, such as detecting and alleviating security events rapidly, redirecting traffic, or load balancing.

Automated controls generate significant benefits, including improved accuracy, a clear audit trail, centralization and harmonization among organizational silos, such as finance and risk. Thus, CSPs are able to address certain technology concerns more effectively than financial institutions, including always-patched databases, deep and comprehensive logging, one-click threat analysis, and access to multiple geographic regions for resource deployment. Financial institutions benefit from CSPs automated collection of evidence and mapping.

Automated services continuously collect and organize IT configuration and logs in a streamlined fashion, which can then be delivered to the banks risk management group.

Another great power of the cloud is automated compliance. Rather than standard on-premise practice of a manual process that an infrastructure team must configure, CSPs use code to automate compliance controls, guaranteeing consistency and comprehensiveness.

Cloud service providers are among the top innovators in the world. They continuously use leading-edge technologies to drive effective risk management. Century-old financial institutions may be slowed by a legacy organizational structure based around risk and control. CSPs, which dont have legacy debt or business incentives to keep over time, are willing to build more efficiently from scratch and remain more efficient over the long run. The CSP, armed with new ideas, can deliver its products much faster than traditional banks can.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 global pandemic, financial institutions have accelerated their use of cloud capabilities, to support remote work, customer service and higher transaction volume. Meanwhile, regulators have become more cognizant of how CSPs work and more comfortable with their risk management practices.

When it comes to risk management, one of the stark differences between a CSP and a financial institution is that a CSP has the ability to empower its employees to be innovative in terms of managing risk.

The overarching goal of the regulators remains the safety and soundness of their supervised financial institution, along with the protection of the end customer. As regulators grow increasingly familiar with the new efficiencies and culture of the cloud service provider industry, there should be increasing customization in their oversight of CSPs.

Noah Kessler, managing director at Protiviti, can be reached at noah.kessler@protiviti.com.

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Cloud Is on the Rise in Financial Services and Regulators Are Taking Note | ABA Banking Journal - ABA Banking Journal

Mudit Khanna, Insoft Financial Services

You have worked hard to build a life for yourself and your family- one full of dreams and happiness. One fine day, you notice that you are going to retire from work but not life. You may have unfulfilled dreams for your post-retirement life by maintaining your day-to-day lifestyle without worrying about expenses. You may want to spend more quality time with your loved ones or travel the world. You may also want to fulfil commitments like your childs higher education or wedding or a new start-up.

With a little retirement planning, you have the power to fulfil all your wishes while maintaining your financial independence. Retirement planning is the process of determining retirement income goals - the actions and decisions necessary to achieve those goals. Retirement planning includes identifying sources of income, sizing up expenses, implementing a savings program, and managing assets and risk.

It is very important to calculate roughly your estimated retirement expenses post inflation to avoid any surprises later and plan your investments accordingly.

To calculate the money which you will need at retirement:

Now comes a million-dollar question that how do we reach such a big corpus?

Start saving early and invest wisely. An early start means you will have to invest a lot less to create the same corpus compared to, if you start late. Calculations show that if a person starts saving at the age of 25 and the monthly investment per month is Rs.X, he will have to invest approx. Rs 2X, if he starts 5 years late say from 30 years.

The Process: Compare the various retirement options and plans that most competent financial organisations provide. Preferably, take help of a seasoned Financial Product Distributor who will be able to guide you through various Investment Products. A Distributor/Advisor helps you identify the various retirement planning strategies which exist and helps you review and compare them too. Set your Retirement Goals. Assess your Current Financial Position. To help you achieve your retirement goals, you need to take stock of where you are today. You must consider the risks that affect your retirement income. Keep your Investment Process Simple! That is most important. Be disciplined!

To create the corpus, start early, invest regularly, and do not dip into your corpus before you retire. Remember that if you dip into your savings at regular intervals, you might gain little from the power of compounding. This could set you behind several steps on your retirement planning. You should be an aggressive investor when young, and gradually shift to conservative products when nearing the retirement age. Taking a chance in the stock market at the age of 60 would be like going bungee jumping at the same age. Just as you would be averse to take a risk with your health, you may not want to mess with your money. So, follow the 100 minus age rule to plan for retirement. If you are 30, invest 70 percent of your portfolio in equity related investments and keep reducing this with age. This not only helps to minimize risk, but also lets you get good returns from an asset class such as equity which can give good returns over the long term.

Surprisingly large number of people find excuses never to start retirement planning. However, in absence of a good retirement benefit in India means you have to plan your investment carefully for your twilight years especially in the face of inflation, as mentioned above and rising life expectancy. No matter how daunting the debt or other spending priorities, you must save for retirement on a regular basis. It is expensive to retire.

So, cherish every moment from now on. Happy Retirement!

Views are personal: The author Mudit Khanna- Director, Insoft Financial Services from Kolkata.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are of the author and are personal. TAML may or may not subscribe to the same. The views expressed in this article / video are in no way trying to predict the markets or to time them. The views expressed are for information purpose only and do not construe to be any investment, legal or taxation advice. Any action taken by you on the basis of the information contained herein is your responsibility alone and Tata Asset Management will not be liable in any manner for the consequences of such action taken by you.

Mutual Fund investments are subject to market risks, read all scheme related documents carefully.

Disclaimer: Content Produced by Tata Asset Management

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Make the most of your Golden Life - Economic Times

The recent docuseries LuLaRich captured the attention of America while showing the inner workings of the multi-level marketing company and how it was able to attract so many millennial mothers across the country.

LuLaRich filmmakers Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason are no strangers to documenting an alleged scam: They also madeFyre Fraud, which documented the disastrous festival that left investors and Bahamanian business owners in ruin, and The Pharmacist which focused on how pill mills and big pharma companies allegedly flouted rules and fostered conditions that created the opioid epidemic.

In LuLaRich, Furst and Nason showed how LuLaRoe founders DeAnne Brady (also known as DeAnne Stidham) and Mark Stidham allegedly preyed upon struggling millennial mothers. While the couple has vehemently denied defrauding anyone, they agreed to pay $4.75 million earlier this year to settle allegations that LuLaRue is a pyramid scheme, the Associated Press reported.

Nason told Oxygen.com that the alleged scheme has been luring people, primarily millennial-age women, by using feminist language like girl boss and boss babe.

I think that this MLM (multi-level marketing) in particular capitalized on those catchphrases and high educational messaging of, you can have it all. You can be a girl boss, this kind of cheap pop feminism, she said.

She called millennial mothers, who she deems well educated and high functioning as particularly susceptible to such language. She said that LuLaRoe, and MLMs in general, can target them because they seem to offer the dream: the ability to be an entrepreneur and a mother with a whole a community of support.

In reality, women dont have that in this society, Nason told Oxygen.com. When you're a mother, unfortunately, its a very isolating experience especially in the beginning and thats a lot of when women need the most support and the most community. These MLMs in particular really sold the dream that women can have purpose, a community and have financial independence."

But, as LuLaRich shows, it was almost exclusively the people at the top of the organization who got rich. Many at the bottom didnt make any money.

Nason attributes this in part to selling an anti-patriarchal structure that doesn't exist, stating that our society "hasn'tevolved yet to a 50/50 structure of gender roles in any shape or form, binary or nonbinary."

"There is an oppressive cycle that is seemingly getting better but mostly cloaked in the guise of progressive thought, she said.

While LuLaRich sold the idea of female empowerment, she said that pure patriarchy was at the heart of the leggings company.

DeAnnes mother, Maurine Startup, founded the American Family and Femininity Institute in 1945, the New York Times reported in 1972. Its goal was to reinforce the idea that women belonged in the home.Startup also published a book called The Secret Power of Femininity in 1969. The following is a passage from that book, as excerpted from the NewYork Times: Stand before a mirror in the privacy of your room and say to yourself, I am just a helpless woman at the mercy of you big, strong men.

Such values and lifestyles are very much at the forefront of this organization now, Nason told Oxygen.com.

Furst told Oxygen.com that no women are operating the company in any substantial way and that even DeAnne seemingly lets Mark make the big decisions.

If you look at the management level, none of the daughters are president, manager, director, he said. Most departments are run by someones husband.

He added, The men have to make the decisions in that family because its a purely patriarchal family.

Its a patriarchal system and MLMs originally were an opportunity for there to be additional income in a home that wouldnt compromise the gender roles so that the mother could work and sell Tupperware or Amway products from home while being the mother and not compromising any of her duties to her husband and her children, he explained.

He added that a good portion of multi-level marketing victims, in general, are Mormon.

I think they deserve our empathy and compassion just as much as anyone else, he said.

One valuable resources for the filmmakers was the podcast The Dream. "We listened toThe Dream podcastin the preproduction and the production of this show. It was very insightful and its the place to go when you want to go much more deeply into MLMs in present day. I would highly recommend to anybody.

Furst said that he hopes men will become more aware from watching LuLaRich.

A lot of people say this is a great show for women to watch but really I think its a great show for men to watch, he said.

Get all your true crime news from Oxygen. Coverage of the latest true crime stories and famous cases explained, as well as the best TV shows, movies and podcasts in the genre.Sign up forOxygen Insiderfor all the best true crime content.

Originally posted here:

How Did LuLaRoe Allegedly Lure and Exploit So Many Millennial Mothers? - Oxygen