Episode 335: George Graham, Head of South Yorkshire Pensions Authority: From Local Impact to an Industry in Transformation - Reflections from a life of service

George Graham is Director and Head of Fund at South Yorkshire Pensions Authority. He has spent a long career in public service, culminating in the last 8 years at SYPA, and prior to that he spent his career in various finance roles at Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Chorley, Lancashire and LPP. He is Governor and Vice Chair of Barnsley College as well as Independent Chair of the Local Pension Board at Lincolnshire County Council. 

George will be retiring from his role as Head of Fund at SYPA at the end of the year, and this discussion was an opportunity to reflect on a career in which public service dominated, and against which a dramatically changing market backdrop cast a long - and positive - shadow. We track his early insights into the challenges of local government, and how his finance roles started to overlap with the investment function. This sight of the investment function led him to be an early mover in local government pooling - starting with the Lancashire and LPFA merger a decade ago - and he explains why the rationale is, for him, so clear cut as the demands of institutional investing have grown.

We speak too about his commitment to local investing as well as to a sustainability agenda, which, as in many of his endeavours has been bold and ahead of its time. Finally we reflect on learnings from a long and varied career, about the development of a leadership style, about learning to go against a natural tendency to be more introverted and deliberately reach out to team members to support them. We end with a discussion of legacy, which in George's case will be a long and impactful one. 

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.