CSA Webinar

Castine Conversations – Interview with Hester White

September 3, 2025.  Please note that this is an automated transcript of the above mentioned podcast; errors may exist. If you have any questions, please contact Castine.

Robin Hodgkins: Hello and welcome to this episode of Castine Conversations. My name is Robin Hodgkins and I’m the president of Castine. In these episodes, we meet the business leaders involved in commission management and research as they’re managed, reported on and paid for by both investment managers and brokers worldwide.

My conversation today is with Hester White, recognized as a true leader in client relationship management, CSAs, and building successful teams on the sell side. For firms such as Nomura, Jefferies, and Peel Hunt, Hester’s experience covers everything from sales to corporate access and from managing CSA teams all the way to sitting on management committees.

Having worked at arm’s length with Hester for several years, it’s clear to me that she brings a depth of expertise to the brokerage community that colleagues, clients, and even vendors can benefit from. Our conversation covers Hester’s background as her career unfolded, how one can contribute so much to so many different firms, and her thoughts on the latest developments in the UK and the EU around commission management.

I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Hester, thank you so much for joining me today.

Hester White: Robin, it’s an absolute delight. I’m so pleased to see you, and I’m really excited to be on this with you today. Thank you.

Robin Hodgkins: Your world has really been focused, since Bristol and the London Business School, on the sell side, and I’m just curious to start off with—just to kind of get a grounding—how did you really get into the brokerage world? Is this something that’s been in your family, or something that has come from left field?

Hester White: Yeah, I love this question because I really hope that whoever’s listening, particularly if they’re younger and worried about their career, can take a deep breath and go, “Oh, actually I think it’s going to be okay,” because for me, my whole reason for coming into the brokerage business was actually to do with horses and horse-related activities. I’ve had a passion for horses since I was about three or four. I grew up in the seventies. In the seventies in England, there was zero money around and we were one of those families. I came from a broken family, and so I was always very conscious that this was something I had to work for—the privilege to be able to ride.  I used to basically work for free at riding centers, etc., to get rides.

While I was at university, I wanted to continue this passion of mine. And my mother very sensibly said, “Well, it’s all yours. You’ve got to drive this yourself.” So every summer holiday—and this was the old times, so rather than everything being online—we’d walk into the careers office at the university and there would literally be a list of the jobs for the summer that you could apply for, and I would apply for the top 10 paying. There was no science—I just went for the 10 that paid the most.

Very luckily, each summer I managed to get one of these jobs. My first was in general banking. My second was investment banking, and that’s when I just felt myself come alive. I absolutely loved those 10 weeks and I was so fortunate. At the end of it, they offered me a job after my degree. So I went back and did my third summer there as well, and then joined them in 1996. That was at a place called BZW, which was connected to Barclays, which no longer exists because it was bought by Credit Suisse. But there’s a big legacy and a big shout out to all the BZW alums who are still in the world and many of whom I’m connected to.

Robin Hodgkins: That’s remarkable. I think for a lot of us, our careers did start with a relatively random walk. So in your case it was more of a random trot with the horses, so it’s a little bit different.

But when you started off in this field, was it hard for you to get noticed, to move up in the world? Because, you know, I hate to say it, but for a lot of people it was very much a boys’ club as much as anything else. Was that an issue for you, or not?

Hester White: So yes, it was a boys’ club. However, I was really fortunate that I joined a really friendly, fun boys’ club. And also—I was thinking about this all the way through my career—I’ve just had these fantastic bosses who have really wanted to help and support me and who gave me a lot of freedom. And I realized in life I need a bit of freedom. They also gave me a lot of responsibilities early on, and so I was tested all the way through. But I had a very good relationship with them all, in that they were all terribly kind underneath it all. And that’s not necessarily the case in any job really. But I guess maybe I started seeking out people who had that ultimate kindness underneath. And that’s what kept it perpetuating through.

But going back to my first time coming onto the trading floor, I actually enjoyed that sort of banter, that male environment. Because rather unusually, I also went to a predominantly boys’ school with a few girls. So I’d grown up in that environment, so it worked for me. It wouldn’t work for everyone. And I’m so delighted nowadays that generally in finance, there’s a much healthier balance across not only the sexes, but also across our nationalities, across our backgrounds, etc.

Robin Hodgkins: I totally agree. It’s a much better place these days, but bravo for working through that and getting to the point where you did. But it also looks like you did seek out people, like mentors and people to learn from and to help guide you along the way.

Hester White: Robin, you know me quite well. I love people. I love getting to know new people. I get my energy from others. And I also have this inherent love of learning. And so, I will always seek out somebody who’s smarter than me, or who’s got a different knowledge base to me because I want to learn from them and pick that up. So I guess that’s how maybe—I was never looking to seek for a mentor. I was always looking for somebody who I could learn from, and really who I wanted to emulate.

Robin Hodgkins: A great approach, and it’s obviously very successful. And maybe we’ll talk later on about some of the work that you’re doing, paying that forward, because I think those people that have really benefited from a strong influence in their past have often used that sense to pay it forward for the next generation, as it were.

But in your work in the brokerage business, you started on the sales side and then you transitioned more to the corporate access side. Is there some connection there as to why you went from wearing one hat to another?

Hester White: Yeah, I’ve had quite a number of different roles. But when you pull them all together, what joins them together really is threefold. One is client facing. I love building those relationships with a client, whether it’s actually internal clients or external clients.

Two is revenue generating. I recognized in myself early on that I’m very goal-oriented, and this is what I’d say to people: it’s really worth trying to analyze yourself and analyze what are your fundamental drivers. I’m goal-oriented and for me, revenue is a very clear goal. You either hit the target or you don’t. And so that works for me.

And then the third is I really love creating new businesses or building a new business area, whether it’s an ultimate business—I mean, not to the same extent that you’ve done Robin, which has been amazing—but taking a new business area within a larger framework and growing it. So those have been my three drivers. And actually that third, that sort of entrepreneurial aspect, is inherited.  I come from—my mother’s an entrepreneur. My grandmother was an entrepreneur. It’s actually from the female side of my family. It’s come through. And I’ve realized that that’s something I need to keep nurturing because that, again, gives me the energy to go.

So I love being—this again harks back to how lucky I was with my early bosses that I’ve had in that they gave me freedom to try things out and to grow, and they gave me the confidence to say, “Look, I’ve got this. I’ll come back to you and let you know how it’s going, but I’ve got it.”

Robin Hodgkins: And were they relatively open to these new ideas that you were creating, these new entrepreneurial areas?

Hester White: Yes. Yeah. And this is again, so I think hopefully this will resonate with quite a lot of people: this idea of being able to perhaps in a safer environment—i.e., in a bigger organization—but being able to apply yourself a little bit more in terms of creativity and in terms of entrepreneurialism, which is that you need to sell your idea, you need to have a well thought through idea and to sell it.

But if that is your style, then there are many enterprises out there who will really adopt and foster you. There’ll be some that won’t, some won’t enjoy that angle, and perhaps that’s not the right place for you. So it is really to be very aware, again, of what the organization is that you are joining and what the sort of culture is of that organization.

I mean, I wouldn’t say go in on day one from having just graduated and going, “Oh, you know what? I’m an entrepreneur. Just leave it with me. I know what I’m doing. I can just turn this business around,” you know—maybe find your way through, but have that, you know, really be aware of what you are looking for and what would suit you as well as you suiting that organization.

Robin Hodgkins: Exactly as you said, some organizations are very open to that, and they’ve prospered from it. And other organizations are very much straight and narrow, just one thing that they want to do. And they don’t want to diverge from that. And I think especially in these days with AI and all the other technology that’s happening, that’s, I think, probably the wrong approach. I think yours is much better.

But when we kind of put that together, when you talk about some of your activities on the client strategy side, on the relationship management side, your skills with people and connections obviously make those things very linked together. It seems to me that there’s a strong link between your skills and how that can bring a lot of success to the client relationship side. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how those are linked and how maybe other people can find links where maybe it eludes them initially.

Hester White: Yeah, for sure. Robin, you and I have always been in these client partnership environments, and I think that word “partnership” is the most important one to have sitting alongside the word “client,” because that really is how I have been able to foster some strong relationships—is I’m thinking as a partnership. I’m almost putting myself in that client’s organization, thinking of myself as working for them, looking back at the company that I’m in, to think what could I—what would I want from this business? How can I get the best from this business? And then mirroring it back. And that is all about very open conversations, which build trust.

Because once there’s a trust between the two of you, then whether it’s the client, whether it’s a prospective client, whether it’s a vendor business, then you start to—it stops being a sort of buy and sell process and it becomes a discussion of how we can make, grow something or make it better. And I think it’s getting, using that mindset, which really brings out the strongest client outcome.

Robin Hodgkins: It doesn’t necessarily follow that I would put myself into their position and say, “How, what do I want to get from Castine from Robin?” Something like that, to kind of turn the tables as you say you’ve done, to look at it from the client’s perspective.

Obviously, you know, we do that because we do work with clients. We have multi-year relationships with them, and we have tremendous client retention. So I think obviously that has crept into it, making sure it’s a two-way street, but you’ve really focused on that as being a major strategy to provide huge benefits to the clients.

Hester White: Well, firstly, Robin, I think you’re doing yourself down. I’ve sat in meetings with you and your team, and your first questions are: “What do you need? How does your business work? What would make it better? What works well now?” You know, I think you and your team really do go out of your way to understand from the client’s perspective, the client’s point of view.

I think maybe this approach comes from when you’re an equity salesperson, which was my first role for 15 years, and you see this with many equity salespeople. It’s effectively an entrepreneurial business. You’re running your own franchise, your own client franchise within your organization, and you’re always looking to obviously try to get the best votes, get the best outcome, get the best commission, get the best research payments, etc. But to do that, you need to be thinking like the client, so you have 14 years of training of that. And I know I’m not alone because when I first joined that sales team at BZW and I had a bunch of senior salespeople all around me, they taught me this. They taught me to think as if you were sitting in with the client.

So I would really advocate that as a way, as an approach for anybody who is looking at or thinking about or embarking on a sales role, you know, whether it’s now or whether it’s a soft sell, whether it’s a hard sell.

Robin Hodgkins: You know, I appreciate your kind comments before. One of the things that I do notice in working with new team members on the Castine side, is often people take an approach of really pushing the features of something. You know, this is what our service can do, as versus what are the benefits—the “what’s in it for me” mnemonic—to think of it from their standpoint. And in a lot of documents that I read through, it’s like, “No, take out the features, make those second priority. Bring in the benefits and focus on those.”

Have you had situations where clients are just—they just don’t open up the way that you’d like them to? They’re very hard to connect with?

Hester White: Yes, for sure. It happens all the time. Yeah. And that’s part of the challenge that’s been so enjoyable really—is every, you know, no two people are the same.

Some have been burnt and you fully respect that. Others are perhaps at a very large institution where there’s been a lot of asking from them all the time. And again, they become wary because it’s very time consuming, having people asking all the time from you because they’re underlying trying to sell to you.

It’s really about working out what is the underlying situation for this individual or for this team in the organization, and therefore it’s again, it’s going back—how would they like to hear from me? How would they like to have the relationship with me? And you’ve got to bring something to the table as well. You can’t just ask for something without giving back. So for example, I would always make sure on a first call with the client, not only have you done all your homework, etc., but that you’ve got some information or a contact—just something that you can give to them. It’s for free, but it’s to show that willingness to open from your side.

Robin Hodgkins: Yes. I think that’s hugely positive. And I think for a lot of new people in the business, they don’t understand the people they’re talking to are so busy that information is a major currency for them. If they can bring something to the table and have a bi-directional relationship where you can help them, they can help you, and over time they will trust you, as you said before—you keep that as a key part of that and they may eventually honor you by giving you some business. So, but just to walk into a room and say, “I’ve got the best commission management system in the world. You must buy this now,” it’s like, yeah, I don’t think that—I haven’t found much success with that over the years. I’ll say that much.

But you have come to the commission management world through sales and through client relationships. When did you start to get introduced to soft dollars or CSAs or RPAs? Whenever it was that that hit your world?

Hester White: Yes. Soft dollars were around when I was at Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers. But you’ll remember the day then they weren’t really—every so often you’d get an email from a client saying, “Oh, please could you pay my Bloomberg bill?” And as a salesperson, that would come through to you because the whole formalization of client relationships was much softer then. And then you just forward that onto accounts. So you didn’t even think about it, it just went through.

And then fast forward to today, where even in the States having given stronger directive in 2006, I think it was on uses of soft dollar. You know, today it’s very much around research, trading, and you know, really what constitutes value for the end client, which means that all of those—as I talked about, as you are a salesperson and you’re running your account, whereas before it wasn’t really relevant—you forwarded it on. Now you are 100% focused on what is the research payment, what is it covering, where does—because sales is very much overlooking that research element of the payment.

And then you’ve got the trading team, sales traders who are very much leading on that commission part of the relationship. Whereas before it was very much conjoined. But I think the transparency has been good from both sides. You know, transparency generally makes a business really knuckle down to what it is. What are the drivers? So what’s superfluous that I’m delivering, and what is it that I’m delivering that’s actually impacting these payments to me? So sharpening up from both sides.

I do feel though, MiFID II, when it first came in, sharpened things possibly a little too much. So I welcome this change directed by the FCA—I think they’ve done a very strong, brave job in listening and in making these amendments.

Now, part of your question, Robin, was when did I become more involved in all of this. And that was actually when I joined my most recent company, Peel Hunt, which was 12, nearly 13 years ago. And I joined them to build their client relationship management business. And two years or so after I joined was when the MiFID II talk started rearing its head. So we were going from a bundled world to this very much unbundled world and as many people may have seen, Peel Hunt was quite at the forefront of talking about why this could be detrimental to UK capital markets and did a very good job educating on the unintended consequences and actually continue to do that now.

So I went from really not being that involved in research payments to being 100% involved in research payments, which was great. It was a huge learning curve. And we were central—I was central in it. And as I said to you before, I love learning new things. And so this was a new string, I guess, to add to my bow.

Robin Hodgkins: Indeed. Yes, I think we lived through MiFID II. It’s a kind of lesson that was learned. And again, I think you made a very good point—kudos to the FCA for rethinking that and looking at how things had played out under that aspect of MiFID II as well.

But what I also see—we’re doing a lot of work in England with firms. Obviously we do a lot of work in the states. We work with firms all over the world, but with brokers in the UK, I think there’s some confusion with them as to whether they want to look at the rebundling—or unbundling, whatever you want to call it. Whether they want to look at CSAs as a friend or a foe. Do they want to look at it as an accommodation, like you said, back in the old days where it’s like, “Yeah, we have a bill to pay Bloomberg,” or is it something where they can actually build a business and have it be profitable and productive beyond just helping a client out from time to time to pay a bill?

Hester White: Robin, I’m really interested that you’re picking up that there’s this lack of surety—whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. In my mind, I think having a CSA relationship with a client is gold dust. The reason being is that it goes back to my comments on trust.

It’s a level of trust between the two of you. If you are on the sell side, then you have visibility on their trading. They are trusting you to manage their commission pot. They’re trusting you to send out the payments, and they have also given you visibility on who else they are paying and how much they’re paying them.

I think that’s a huge amount of trust there. It is also for trading. I mean, let’s go back—let’s think as a trader yourself, as a trading house. Every trade that you have coming in gives you liquidity to trade on the other side of it. Why would you not want an extra trade? So for me, a trade is worth double a research payment.

Again, this is why I would be falling over myself to be signing up CSA clients at the moment.

Robin Hodgkins: That aligns with our feeling. We work with a lot of brokers that have made significant paths towards growth with CSAs here and in England. I think we’ll see this as well in Europe with the changes coming up there soon.

But yes, it is interesting to me to see that there are some firms that are still looking at this just as an accommodation and not something that is a growth opportunity for them. We have a colleague working with us who’s worked for a number of brokers, and he’s added hundreds if not thousands of clients to the different brokers’ client rosters because he offers CSAs and he sees it exactly the same way you do—that it’s helping the desk in a lot of ways that they may not understand.

Hester White: Exactly, exactly. It just goes back to this client relationship. It’s a partnership. You are offering them another strand of service. Why would you not want to do that?

Robin Hodgkins: And then if you look at it from the research providers’ perspective, the changes that they’re looking at now with the regulation changes from the FCA—how do you think that they’re dealing with these new rules? Are they beginning to respond to the new revenue they might be seeing through CSAs? Or is it still maybe too early to tell?

Hester White: Are you talking about independent research providers who don’t have the trading platform?

So I know to start with, they were rather hesitant on this aspect and thought that it would be detrimental to them. I thought it was really interesting to see the results of Substantive Research’s most recent unbundling survey, because one of the topics they were discussing was how positive this new form of research payments would be for independent research providers.

Because it gave the buy side more bandwidth to be able to sign up new research providers. And indeed, not necessarily needing to sign them up, but now it’s much easier for them to onboard a new research client by being able to just pay them out of a CSA.

Therefore, it’s much easier to try somebody for six months, to try somebody for three months, whereas before, I used to hear from them saying, “We’d love to have a research relationship with X or Y, but the process of getting them on board is like a year-long process with us. And at the end of it, it might be a no.” But now that’s gone.

So again, I think—maybe I’m an optimist, and I’m glad—but for these independent research providers, I think this is an excellent opportunity for them to be getting back out there and to be showcasing what they do.

Robin Hodgkins: Yeah, I totally agree, and I think there’s been a lot of discussion about how the research budgets are going back up again. Now they’re moving away from P&L back to either a hybrid or back to full CSA payments for research. The conversations between the asset managers and their clients, I think, have been going well so far.

So I think the indicators are definitely in that direction, and it’s great to hear that you’re also thinking that the research providers and the IRPs are also beginning to think that way as well—that it’s going to be a huge benefit for them. I think it can do nothing less than open up huge new opportunities for new firms and for firms on the research side to grow.

So one aspect that might be a little bit of a wrinkle on that side is the latest famous two letters in the world, which is AI. Do you have any thoughts as to what you think AI is affecting so far on the research side, whether short term or long term?

Because at the last conference, I was one of the panelists there. AI did come up a lot. A lot of people are saying—some people are saying it’s not going to have any impact because research is so specialized. Other people are saying that five years down the line, research is going to be completely different.

What are your views on AI and how it impacts research?

Hester White: My view is—and some firms are already looking at how to implement this—that with AI, I think this is a positive, but it’s a change. Both sides need to be prepared, especially the sell side. The buy side are going to already have at their fingertips the tool by which they can curate their own research, but they need the underlying data to make that research.

And part of that underlying data is obviously deep sector, company, or industry knowledge. So for example, if I’m an analyst sitting at one of the large buy sides, I have a large amount of research at my fingertips. Rather than trawling through all that, or rather than even using AI to trawl through the last 10 results coming from X company or whatever, now I would, using my AI tool, say, “Write me a document which looks at the pros and cons of adopting AI in the research industry. Let’s say, who would be the winners, who would be the losers, and back that up with information from the last three years’ sets of results. And then taking the top two winners, the top two losers, show me a graph of their earnings and their ROI over the last three years as well.”

So I’ve created something that’s very specific to what I want to know, which I can say, “Write it in the style of X or Y,” however I like to consume, or not even written—”Read it to me because I want to listen to it on the train.” So that is invaluable. I mean, this is where I think things are going to go in two years, probably not five years.

So for the buy side, what does this mean? This means that the quarterly results update note is obsolete. Now that is already being written by AI, or the majority of it’s being written by AI because it’s freeing people up. But in this future world, that note’s not necessary.

If you think about what the fundamental is of research—of sell-side research—the fundamental part of it is what is in the analyst’s head, and it’s their learned knowledge. Whether that’s been because they’ve been an analyst for 30 years, whether it’s because they went to an offsite in a mine in the depths of the Amazon and nobody else could get there, so they know something different. That aspect. But also it is not only knowledge, but it’s also how do they question that knowledge.

So it’s how does that person think? Do they question something? Do they have a sort of left-field angle that really adds value? Do they have knowledge across two industries? And that adds value. So I think this is where firms are going to really be able to differentiate themselves—with what information is in that analyst’s head, and how does that analyst analyze that information.

Robin Hodgkins: So it’s not just a matter of saying, “Here, you have access to millions of reports and we just want you to summarize them. We want you to come up with some charts.” It’s much more the mosaic or the personal expertise of somebody who can synthesize all that, knowing what the overall goals are, and to be able to map that together as opposed to just having nice access to a data set, which by itself is relatively useless.

Hester White: Exactly. And bear in mind, it’s not just analysts or research of a company, but you also overlay that with trading data—trading data in the same industry in another part of the world. What happened when X happened to Y? You overlay it with that. Then you’re bringing in transcripts as well.

Because AI can process so much information—way more than, as we know, way more than any human can—you can start bringing in this really rich layering of information to build your analysis and effectively it’s your alpha-creative analyst analysis.

Robin Hodgkins: But one question that comes to me about all this—and this also applies to commission management—is that it seems like these are such new fields. I mean, for a lot of people in the UK they haven’t really operated a CSA regimen because of the changes since 2017. And I see that also now with AI.

I think there’s a struggle that’s going to happen with firms, research firms, brokers, analysts, administrators to try and learn—I’m splitting different issues here, but learning CSAs on the one hand and, more particularly on the research side, understanding how to use tools around AI to really benefit the firm. And I don’t know if there’s an easy solution to getting people up to speed on either of those other than just spending time and finding mentors—going back to that original point—to learn from them and to become experts as quickly as possible.

Hester White: Well, exactly, and actually, quite frankly, CSA—that’s not very complicated. It’s having good tools. It’s really using common sense in terms of how splits are, in terms of who your providers are, in terms of knowing you’ve got… A buy-side firm has all their trading data. They know where they tend to trade, at what time of year, or under what scenario, in which jurisdiction. So they know that they’re not going to put all their eggs in one basket and sign up just with a load of brokers that would provide them with revenue only in one scenario.

It’s just time. That’s going to take time really. AI is the more interesting one because that needs a mindset shift and it needs people to really relax into it and to be positive and to realize how much we can get from using AI as a tool and to step away from this “Oh my God, I’m going to lose my job” mindset. Someone probably will lose their job with the mindset of “Wow, this is great. Oh my God, I’ve tried this out. This is good. This has made such a difference to me writing a report or me creating an avatar to make a phone call,” and then to question it and go, “Oh, but was that really correct? Where’s that feed coming from? Okay, I want to challenge this a bit more.” That mindset—you know, bringing that mindset to the table, you’re going to go a long way and life is going to be really fun, really interesting.

Robin Hodgkins: Indeed. And I think in some ways maybe there’s an advantage to people that are entering into the field now because they are much more tool-aware and they’re much more willing to learn. So whereas in another conversation I might have been positing that it might be hard for somebody to enter into this field, in fact, maybe on the AI side, it might actually be easier for them because they bring a wealth of skills and curiosity to a firm that might have been relatively set in their ways and really don’t even know the questions to start asking about AI.

Hester White: Completely, 100% agree. And I mentor some young people and just when they say, “Well, what’s the first piece of advice? What should I take away?”

I say, “Use and play with the new tools that are out there because you are literate in them. And the person interviewing you very likely is not literate and is going to think that you are amazing, even if you know the basics.” So use that to your advantage and become completely fluent in this new language. Fluent, comfortable, and ready to challenge it. And you don’t need to be able to code because you can use AI to code. But it’d be interesting—maybe, why don’t you try writing a small piece of code using AI, even if you can’t code? Because then if your job, if you do end up working with, let’s say, the IT team, if you’re sitting alongside them or working on something, you know what they’re doing. You can speak their language. It opens things up.

So I think it’s a huge opportunity. And I saw somebody wrote the other day that when it comes to being a research analyst in the future, that we’re probably going to be looking at people with this dual skill set of 50% analytical and 50% data scientist, which I thought was great.

Robin Hodgkins: Yes. And to have a mindset of being open to these new options and these new tools. I mean, we’re doing a lot of work with AI ourselves and nothing that we’re really talking about publicly at this point in time, but every time we look under another rock, it’s like, “Oh, this would be great to do something with AI.”

And a lot of that we benefit from because at Castine’s side, we have a lot of people that are young and are very inquisitive, really enjoy tackling new projects like that—the same way that I’m hoping a research analyst would be as open to tackling things when they go to work for a firm doing research.

Hester White: Well, Robin, that’s interesting. So how do you, when you are looking, when you are doing your hiring of these younger people coming in, what sort of skill set range do you look for?

Robin Hodgkins: Well, I think to your point, it’s not just one thing. I think it’s cultural. I think it’s being able to fit into a team, having a science background. But one of my best colleagues ever was somebody who graduated from a great university with a philosophy degree. So being able to bring different mindsets, different skill sets into a company, I think, is very beneficial. But the main thing is curiosity and curiosity, work ethic, culture, team-focused.

I don’t think that’s much different from a technical company like mine versus an IRP doing research in Paris. I think that a lot of the larger long-term views—that things are not going to change. I think those walls are falling and I’m hoping that people will listen to the people that are out there these days saying there’s a lot of new things we can bring to the table. It has to.

Thank you so much for joining me today. This has been a great conversation. I wish we had many hours more to talk about all the different nuances that these different topics have brought up. But I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your thoughts on this industry mentoring and on where this industry’s going to go in the future.

Hester White: Robin, thank you very, very much for inviting me on. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Been lovely to see you again, and I really, really enjoyed these topics of conversation.

Robin Hodgkins: Thank you very much. Hope to see you soon. Bye.

I’d like to thank Hester for spending time with me today. This has been a great conversation. You can reach Hester on LinkedIn by searching for “Hester White”. For more information on Castine, please visit CastineLLC.com.

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