1. spotlight
28 Superfunds May 2015
C
racking the ice with an oar in the black, pre-dawn stillness on the
Charles River was as much a part of Ariane Barker’s Boston University
education as her economics and mathematics degree.
The strikingly tall Emergency Services and State Super (ESSSuper) board
member says she was recruited to row in her early days on the Boston campus
“when my height was noticed”, and passed tryouts for a place in one of the
university’s revered Terrier Rowing Eights, competing in the international
Head of the Charles Regatta.
With characteristic dedication and focus, Ariane rose at 4am four or more
mornings a week to train for two hours on the river, went off to university
lectures, then clocked on at her part-time job with investment banker Bear
Stearns, before returning to campus to study.
“I worked as much as I studied when I was at university, as I believe
strongly in working hard and saving for what you want to achieve,” Barker says.
“You learn a lot about yourself when you work at that level; you become very
disciplined and focused.”
The middle child of an Austrian engineer and a French teacher, Barker had a
peripatetic childhood, starting kindergarten in Paris, then attending schools in
Boston, Philadelphia and Amsterdam with her sister and brother as her father
moved from one project to another. She began her finance career in international
capital markets with Merrill Lynch in New York in 1994. “It was a real trial by
fire,” she says, “but I thrived and loved the technical depth I was able to achieve.”
Transferred to London, Hong Kong and Tokyo with Merrill Lynch, and later
working in Asia for Goldman Sachs and HSBC, she helped manage a brokerage
merger in Tokyo, and focused on capital markets in debt and equity, before
moving to Melbourne with her Australian husband five years ago and turning
her attention to superannuation. Appointed as a board member for ESSSuper
in 2013, Barker finds her fiduciary responsibilities “immensely rewarding,
satisfying and meaningful”.
“My role as an independent thinker on the ESSSuper Board is more fulfilling
than investment banking, for I am effectively ensuring the safeguarding of assets
of people who have a done a lifetime of hard work. In investment banking, you
are not always given the full picture, and motivations for transactions are not
always transparent. One of the things I find most gratifying in super is that we
are all there for a similar purpose.”
Ariane Barker speaks to CAROLYN SWANSON about her
around-the-world journey from part-time investment
banking and pre-dawn rowing in the United States to
her “immensely rewarding” role on the Emergency
Services and State Super board in Australia.
Standing tall
PhototographyDAVIDRUSSELL

2. Superfunds May 2015 29Superfunds May 2015 29

3. spotlight
30 Superfunds May 2015
This high-achiever admits to some
challenging “curveballs” presented
by the inevitable intersection of her
personal and professional lives. In a
speech at a Women in Super networking
breakfast at the ASFA Conference last
year, she described how the context of
our “personal stories” will always overlay
our professional lives, recalling four
particularly difficult years of juggling
work with the eventual discovery that
her first child was deaf and required
appropriate intervention and treatment.
“I have always liked to be disciplined
and focused in working towards specific
goals. Until my daughter was born, it was
more straightforward to achieve goals
because they weren’t such a complex
problem, but now I am careful about
goal-setting, for it took until she was
nearly four to get a proper diagnosis
and then hearing aids.
“The experience of trying to get on
with thriving, not surviving, while raising
a child with a disability has helped me
to put things in perspective about what
is important and where I need to apply
my energy and focus. Through that
perspective, I found solutions and now
my daughter is developing beautifully,
so I can focus on my core strengths,
while she gets on with hers.”
Barker’s core strengths involve
identifying risk and facilitating complex financial decision-
making at a board level. As well as her ESSSuper role, she sits
on the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute Investment
Committee and Development Board, and is a member of the
Community Advisory Committee to Melbourne’s Royal Eye
and Ear Hospital.
Confident in her early employer, Bear Sterns’, armour-
plating as one of the world’s wealthiest securities firms, Barker
was jolted ten years later to see JP Morgan Chase & Co buy
the firm for less than a tenth of its value, followed by, only
six months later, the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The global
financial crisis (GFC) galvanised Barker to focus on risk: “a
process of identifying and understanding risks, scrutinizing
them then mitigating accordingly. The GFC showed us that
the finance industry was not as safe as the public thought it
was, but it led to its coming of age and a shift from one way
of thinking to another.”
Preferring not to comment on the
likelihood of another GFC, Barker
instead likes to concentrate on strategies
to mitigate exposure. She is passionate
about promoting financial literacy
and the need for rigour in saving for
retirement. “There is no silver bullet; it
is really being disciplined about saving
throughout a working life and investing
prudently. We are given messages about
beachside lounge retirement, but we
still have expenses and mortgages and
we need to plan for that. If you can put
something aside with every single pay
check over a lifetime, you will reap the
benefits of compound interest.”
After settling in Melbourne with her
husband and their two daughters five
years ago, Barker won an Australian
Institute of Company Directors’ board
diversity scholarship and selection as
one of 70 high-potential, board-ready
women, which contributed to her
ESSSuper Board appointment.
Gratified by ESSSuper’s win as the
top rated super fund for members’
financial satisfaction for 2014 by
the Morgan Gallup poll, earning a
satisfaction score of 81.3 per cent,
well ahead of its nearest competitors;
Catholic Super (72.7) and HESTA
(65.4), Barker credits the fund’s success
to ‘a well-governed investment policy
with a talented and dedicated management team and a strong
relationship with our members’.
“Scale is of course a powerful factor,” Barker says of
the SuperRatings five-star rated fund’s overall success,
“particularly the ability to diversify and thus mitigate potential
investment risks”.
As for her own success, she accepts that being a woman has
affected her career prospects, but “no more so than my other
qualities. As with many women working professionally, we
must take the sum of our parts, gender being one of them”.
“Having worked across a range of markets and cultures,
I don’t like differentiation by any difference in the corporate
sphere, or even the fact we have to discuss diversity; we
need to turn the conversation back to skills and working
collaboratively. I believe in mutual respect and skills.”
The GFC showed us that
the finance industry was
not as safe as the public
thought it was, but it led
to its coming of age and
a shift from one way of
thinking to another