Rebecca Heun is Managing Director of Aksia LLC where she is a senior leader in their Operational Due Diligence function. She has spent 18 years at Aksia and prior to that held a series of other financial roles. We met during a recent trip to Omaha, and what followed was a fascinating fresh look at the process of operational due diligence as well as a deep dive into financial sector start up life.
Our conversation starts with Rebecca's aspirations to be on Broadway, and how some practical realities led to a detour into initially fraud investigations and other back office financial roles. A move to NYC followed and some assertive moves that led to Rebecca ultimately interviewing to be one of the early employees at Aksia, then a bare start up. She helped build the operational due diligence function there and later led Aksia's expansion into London. We dig in to the craft of operational due diligence and the importance of psychology, studying human behavior, the desire to present everything in a glowing and positive light and the importance of both reading between the lines and digging in to motivations and the reasons for certain disclosures. This gets to the essence of fraud, and we learn about the fraud triangle and the circumstances that often have to be in place for fraud to take place.
Moving then to the recent phase of her career, we hear about pivots, dialing up and dialing down intensity when necessary, as well as other entrepreneurial urges that she has occasionally listened to. Her latest passion is a focus on health, and the importance of modulating stress so as to focus on the body's balance and resilience.
This is a fascinating discussion about a less well understood aspect of the due diligence process.
Series 5 of 2025 is kindly sponsored by Diamond Hill. Diamond Hill invests on behalf of clients through a shared commitment to its valuation-driven investment principles, long-term perspective, capacity discipline and client alignment. An independent active asset manager with significant employee ownership, Diamond Hill’s investment strategies include differentiated US and non-US equity, alternative long-short equity and fixed income.
