I’VE BEEN SERVING AS CHAIR OF CFA SOCIETY TORONTO’S 2018/19 Board of Directors for a full year, and my experience can only be summarized as being challenging and rewarding. For the last 12 months, my role has given me the privilege of working with our Society staff and dedicated volunteers to produce some of the industry’s most relevant and engaging content through our events, publications, and awards programs. And, it has become clear to me over that time that the finance industry is continuing to evolve rapidly, and so are the needs of our charterholder members.

In the past two years, we’ve restructured our volunteer committees, redefined and modernized our Society vision and mission statement, and established a three-year 2019–2021 strategic plan. These activities have helped us to establish a solid foundation for our staff and volunteers by providing a common objective. We can also ensure that all the activities we provide will be central to providing relevant and timely content while promoting the CFA charterholder as an industry standard in this time of growing disruptions.

This past fiscal year, we’ve worked closely with CFA Institute on the second year of the Global Brand Campaign to help define and target high-net-worth individuals and employers. This year’s campaign goal was to highlight the professional competence and high degree of trust and ethics embodied in the CFA charter. The multichannel campaign leveraged out-of-home ad spaces in Union Station and multiplatform digital search and display ads. We’re still in the process of evaluating the data we’ve gathered, but from a top level, the campaign has resonated with its Toronto-area target audience. We’ll share more details on the results of this campaign as they become available.

Finally, we’ve continued our outreach efforts with local universities through our various awards and scholarship programs. The goal of these awards is to promote the values embodied in the CFA charter and to recognize the contributions the academic community—from both students and professors—in developing future leaders in finance. (Read more on page 20.)

We’ve made great strides in the finance community this past fiscal year, and I look forward to further helping our local charterholders to advance through relevant programming and industry recognition of the CFA designation.