Euan Munro, chief executive of the £109bn asset manager Newton, had been in the industry for 27 years when, in 2019, his outlook on the world changed massively.
Munro was at that time well into his stint as chief executive at Aviva Investors, a business he joined having previously been the fund manager who launched the Global Absolute Return Strategy (GARS) fund at Standard Life, and by his own admission an ambitious person.
He has not lost those traits, but says his perspective was altered in 2019 when a mine, operated by multi-national company Vale, collapsed in Brazil and 270 workers died.
Munro says: "With the rise in popularity of sustainable investing now, there are lots of people around the industry claiming to have cared about it since they were in nappies. I am not going to make that claim about myself.
"But when I read that Vale paid $7bn (£5.3bn) compensation to workers' families for that disaster, but were still able to do a share buyback that year, it really reminded me. I am from a mining village in Fife [Scotland], and my father was one of four siblings. Three of them, including him, died prematurely from cancers caused, in my view, by the environment of slag heaps and mines where we lived.
"My father died in his 50s, and that was because the mining company did not care about indigenous workers in Scotland or anywhere else that they employed. And I suddenly realised, as an industry, we have to hold these firms to account for how they are treating people.
"I find it very empowering to be at Newton, which is a firm that has been doing sustainable investing for many years.”
The journey that has taken Munro to the top role at Newton, a subsidiary of the Wall Street giant BNY Mellon Investment Management, began in the less than auspicious surrounds of Scottish engineering factories.
He says: “I did a physics degree because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Engineering seemed like the obvious thing, and I worked summer jobs soldering for engineering firms.
"But I realised that while engineers are respected for their technical skill, they don’t really ever get to run the firms, and I always thought I had it in me to run firms, if the industry was right. In truth, I was a terrible engineer anyway, I could pass the exams, but whatever I built in the lab never worked.
"I also saw how passionate the other engineers were about what they do, some of them built model airplanes in their spare time, but that was never for me. Then I realised that lots of the big insurance companies in Edinburgh were run by actuaries, so there was a technical career where I could also advance to running the company if I was good enough.
"It would be disingenuous of me to say that I never thought I could be a chief executive, however much I might present as an avuncular and not hyper-ambitious person.”
