Vancity CEO Christine Bergeron to chair InBC's 9-member board of directors

, ,
#1

InBC Investment Corp, the BC government’s new crown agency and $500 million strategic investment fund, today announced its nine-member board of directors. Christine Bergeron, president and chief executive officer of Vancity, will serve as the organization’s board chair.

Read the article for the full 9 member board.

Now the real work begins, of hiring a CEO and Chief Investment Officer.

What is InBC? It’s a special kind of invest in BC fund, here’s more from the end of the article:

InBC is modelled after strategic investment funds in other jurisdictions including the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Danish Investment Fund, and the Scottish National Investment Bank.

On LinkedIn, the author William Johnson asked:

$500 million in taxpayer funds are in the hands of these people. Thoughts?

#2

Here’s what I answered on LinkedIn:

I know and trust Glen Lougheed and hope you can be a force for GSD’ing.

The InBC model has the potential to be like great sovereign wealth funds that have worked elsewhere, like Ireland.

We’re going to need to double down on both starting a long tail of made in BC businesses that can export and sell to the world, as well as sustaining anchor companies that draw the world to us.

Moonshots and Main Street and less early exits to foreign buyers.

#3

It’s interesting but should also raise a lot of valid questions that I hope will ultimately be asked by the media and the tech community.

Perhaps I’m biased but maybe I question having only one tech investor on the board. Haywood is pretty firmly in the mining and resources category in terms of background so I assume that resource development will be part of the mandate. Ingrid seems to have a background in renewable energy and climate which I think is great. Overall, nothing too surprising for BC here. Sounds like it will have a broad mandate. Nothing published on that yet though.

I do question the heavy amount of government/political appointments to the board. Two ministers, a former minister and a policy wonk seems a bit excessive for what is supposed to be an investment fund. I’m not sure I see what they are bringing to the table here. Also not sure how this compares to the other funds listed but a quick check of people affiliated with the Danish fund only turned up one political appointment.

Fund size seems small comparatively. The Irish fund is 12.6B(CAD), Danish is 6.8(CAD) and the SNIB was launched Nov 2020 with 3.4B (CAD). One could argue those are national funds but populations and GDPs are comparable with BC.

Overall I do like the idea of sovereign funds. I don’t expect this to be making a lot of risky bets, but doubling down on winners could be a good strategy.

2 Likes
#4

Really great analysis, thanks for digging in @chnicola. I’m hoping there will be a broader advisory group that folks like you can be part of.

On size of fund: ultimately we’re a small province. I’m actually a bit worried about enough good ideas being sourced to back! We need a diversity of funding, cheque size, and regions.

There might be some fund of funds approach to anchor other efforts which could be one way to see more diversity of approaches.

…just as long as we don’t hand money to Toronto based fund managers again!