The Future of Finance Podcast · Sep 30, 2026 · 38m · 25m saved
With John Hoeppner, Head of Strategic Relationships & Active Ownership at Builders Vision
John Hoeppner went from an asset manager overseeing a trillion dollars to a family office with about $15 billion, and expected companies to stop taking his calls. They did not.
Asset owners routinely ask managers for proxy-voting reports and counts of company meetings. Hoeppner said those come second: the first question is what the manager thinks its purpose is, and the one that settles it is what has actually changed.
"All that matters is outcomes."
John Hoeppner, head of strategic relationships and active ownership at Builders Vision, Lukas Walton's family office, on The Future of Finance Podcast, spent five years on the stewardship team at Legal & General Investment Management before joining Builders Vision. He wrote chapter 5 of the Handbook of System-Level Investing, "Different Organizations, Different Leverage Points," which compares the two jobs.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 38 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 principles that matter.
Key Takeaways
An index manager's influence comes from what it does after it owns a stock, not from which stocks it buys
Managers that take a public view get more influence than managers that offer clients a menu
Reducing systemwide risk produces "better beta", and the client never sees it
Managers will not change until asset owners demand it, he said, and they are not demanding it
Ask a manager its purpose before asking for its proxy-voting report
Meeting a company 25 times a year is an activity, not an outcome
Builders Vision picked cement because it is hard, not because it is easy
Low-emission products are a few percent of the big producers' sales
A $15B owner got almost the same depth of company access as a trillion-dollar manager, by bringing specialists
Regulation tends to follow what investors demand, from disclosure to board professionalism to CEO pay
1. A Career on Every Side
The host asked for the arc of Hoeppner's career and how he came to sustainable investing.
Research, products, data, stewardship, then an asset owner
Hoeppner started in capital markets research at Cambridge Associates about 20 years ago, as sustainable investing was emerging. He said he left slightly disappointed that few clients, and few large investment consultants, were interested.
Next came a few years at Northern Trust building first-generation ESG products, mostly negative screening and tilted portfolios. He called the next stage the most creative of his career: six years as an entrepreneur with a new kind of ESG data that studied whether companies get a sales lift from their sustainability pitch. That taught him how companies think about the subject, he said. After that came five years on the stewardship team at Legal & General, and the last two at Builders Vision on the asset-owner side.
Where the system-level idea came from
He said he met the concept midway through his time at Legal & General. He is a board member of the Shareholder Commons, which he said helped him separate the performance of an individual security from the performance of the whole market, and see the trade-off between the two. Legal & General also saw itself as a universal owner, an investor so large it effectively owns the whole market, and he said universal ownership and system-level investing have a lot in common.
