Rise Across, Inclusion in Finance Europe’s cross-company and cross-country mentoring programme, launched its first cohort on 20 May 2026. In this pilot, the mentees are women and the mentors are of all genders, connecting professionals across firms, markets, functions and career stages. The pilot closes at the end of October 2026, with an assessment beginning in November 2026.
Are firms developing talent in too narrow a circle?
Asset management is built on the search for insight. Firms combine data, experience and different interpretations to reach better investment and business decisions. Yet when it comes to developing people, the industry often relies on a much narrower pool of perspective: the managers, sponsors and informal networks available inside one organisation.
Internal mentoring remains valuable. It helps people understand their firm, navigate its culture and build relationships close to their work. But it also operates within the assumptions, hierarchy and business model of that firm. The people best placed to challenge an individual’s thinking may sit elsewhere in the industry.
The opportunity is not simply to create more mentoring. It is to make mentoring a channel through which knowledge, confidence and professional networks travel across the industry.
What Rise Across is
Rise Across is designed to widen that circle. Ric van Weelden, Chair of Inclusion in Finance Europe, described the design in terms of cross-pollination. In many cases, a participant’s mentor or mentee sits in a different country, at a different firm and in a business built on a different model. That, he argued, is what sets Rise Across apart from an internal mentoring scheme.
His perspective matters because cross-company mentoring is IiFE’s model in miniature: member firms pooling experience and perspective that no single organisation holds alone.
Asmus Tvede Madsen, Strategic People Expert at Nordea Asset Management, IiFE board member and Lead of IiFE’s Gender Equality Community, explained that the programme was created to make the Community’s ambition tangible for member firms and their people. For this pilot, mentees are women across different career levels and areas of asset management, while mentors are of all genders and drawn from across the participating network.
How the matching works: difference as a development asset
The pilot is designed to test what becomes possible when difference is treated as part of the design rather than a barrier to overcome. Every pair had to meet three requirements:
- Mentor and mentee come from different member firms.
- They share at least one language.
- They have different levels of industry experience.
The process then considered focus areas, personality, area of work, preferred meeting frequency and overlapping interests or goals.
How it works: the mentee leads, the mentor challenges
The mentee leads. The mentee makes first contact, schedules meetings, sets the agenda and defines development goals. Curiosity is central, and the mentee retains ownership of their development and the choices that follow.
The mentor contributes. The mentor acts as a knowledge sharer, storyteller, adviser, cheerleader and discussion partner, offering relevant experience, constructive feedback and challenge. The aim is to help the mentee find their own answers rather than prescribe them.
The MentorCliQ platform supports goals, milestones and development-hour tracking. Its guidance is deliberately flexible, so pairs can adapt suggested discussions to their own goals.
Development should not produce a “watered-down” professional
Nigel Cresswell, CEO and Managing Partner of Quoniam and Executive Sponsor of IiFE’s Gender Equality Community, explained at the kickoff that mentoring can build capability, confidence and judgement: about oneself, about other people and about how to operate effectively.
Early in his career, he lacked confidence, felt that he did not belong and tried to perform an image of what he believed a professional should be. Mentoring helped him separate two questions that are often confused. How can someone adapt effectively to a professional situation? And how can they do so without losing the qualities that make them themselves?
A senior female colleague helped him work through that tension. Later mentors supported him through a new investment-sales environment, unfamiliar expectations and periods of pressure. Their value came not from comfortable reassurance, but from enough trust for honesty and enough challenge for course correction.
Development should not mean teaching people to reproduce one established model of leadership. It should help them become more effective while keeping the qualities, experiences and perspectives they were hired for.
An encouraging early signal
At the programme’s midpoint, participants who responded were asked how likely they would be to recommend Rise Across to a colleague. Mentees gave an average score of 4.75 out of 5, and mentors gave 4.25. These results are an early indication. The full pilot will be assessed from November 2026.
Can firms collaborate while competing for talent?
Recruitment and talent mobility were not discussed at the kickoff, but the model raises the question. Participating asset managers collaborate on development while continuing to compete for talent. Wider professional networks may raise questions about talent mobility. A sustainable response is to create the culture, development opportunities and career pathways that give talented people compelling reasons to stay.
What happens next
The programme closes at the end of October 2026, with an assessment beginning in November. Its 44 mentoring matches will generate insight not only for the people involved, but also for the future design of cross-firm talent development across the IiFE network.
The immediate measure of success is the quality of the relationships: whether participants establish trust, hold useful conversations and make progress against goals that matter to them. The longer-term opportunity is wider. Each pair can expand a network, transfer knowledge across organisational boundaries and make different routes through asset management more visible.
IiFE editorial insight: If asset managers benefit from exchanging insight across countries, firms and functions, the development of their people should not remain confined to organisational boundaries.
