Executive Team
Sam Pierce, CEO & President, has spent more than a dozen years involved in the values-based investment community. Prior to IW Financial, Mr. Pierce served as Director of Research for the Socially Responsible Investor Services division of Proxy Monitor. He has also been Vice President at Citizens Funds and Assistant Vice President at Wellington Management Company. Mr. Pierce earned his B.A. from Harvard University.
Dan Porter, Founder & Vice President of Marketing, has spent more than 20 years in the communications and education fields. During that time he founded and managed both for-profit and non-profit organizations. Prior to IW Financial, Mr. Porter was President at the Center for Educational Media, a communications firm that served clients such as PBS, the Houghton Mifflin Company, and the U.S. EPA. Mr. Porter earned a BA with honors from Dartmouth College.
Mark Bateman, Director of Research, has more than a dozen years of experience supporting institutional investors with research and software tools for values-based investing and proxy voting. Mr. Bateman spent eleven years at the Investor Responsibility Research Center in a range of positions, including Vice President of Research and Operations, Managing Director of Research, and Director of the Environmental Information Service. During this time, he served on the Steering Committee of the Global Reporting Initiative creating an organization and framework for corporate sustainability reporting. Following his departure from IRRC, he served as a consultant on values-based investing and corporate responsibility issues for a number of clients, including the U.S. EPA. Mr. Bateman earned a BA from Johns Hopkins University and an MA from George Washington University.
Normajean Forbes, Director of Finance and Administration, is responsible for managing financial activities and human resources at IW Financial. She joined the company in 2004. In her thirty plus year career, Ms. Forbes has served as Comptroller or Director of Finance for companies in the real estate, legal, finance, and television industries, where she served on the management teams of both mature and start-up companies. Her experience includes accounting, budgeting, cash management, financial reporting, information systems, mergers and acquisitions, and strategic planning.
Glen Yelton, Research Manager, is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Research Department. Glen has been a consultant in primary and secondary business research for the past fifteen years. For the past five and a half years he has served a variety of roles for IW Financial, including sales and customer support, Senior Research Analyst, and his current position as Research Manager. Prior to joining IW Financial, Glen oversaw the development and operation of a registered investment advisor’s research program focusing on ESG data collection. Glen has also provided competitive intelligence research for a variety of Fortune 100 clients in a wide range of industries including consumer products, automotive and technology. He also served as an interrogator in the United States Army and as a key participant in the development of several business intelligence and corporate information database-driven software products. Glen received his B.S. degree from East Tennessee State University.
Independent Directors
Mary Ann Tynan is a former partner of Wellington Management Company, LLP, where she served as Director of Regulatory Affairs for 18 years and served as Chair of the Ethics Committee, the Proxy Policy Committee, and the Wellington Management Company Charitable Fund.
Carol Atwood is the President and CEO of Spartacus Media Enterprises, a social mission media company dedicated to effecting positive social change through mass media. Ms. Atwood is the former President and CEO of TMG Solutions, a New York-headquartered sales and marketing outsourcing company which was ranked among the top 100 women-owned businesses by Working Woman magazine.
James Lincoln owns Lincoln Capital Management, an investment management business he has run for more than twenty years. Apart from Lincoln Capital, Mr. Lincoln manages a $15 million venture capital fund, VIKA/JDL, focused on small, sustainable business, and a $56 million real estate management company, LFM, that specializes in income-producing, commercial assets.
IW Financial Advisory Board
Jeff Stewart currently serves as Vice President for IntrinsiQ, LLC, a company backed by Accel-KKR. IntrinsiQ is the leader in medical oncology care software and the only source for longitudinal data on trends in cancer drug usage. Previously, Mr. Stewart was a co-founder and chief information officer for Wall Street On Demand, Inc., market leader in web delivery of financial information. Founded in 1991, Wall Street On Demand was sold to Goldman Sachs PIA in 2006. At Wall Street on Demand, in addition to his responsibility for the operational systems, Mr. Stewart launched products for the Global Research Settlement, retail brokerage and wealth management. Mr. Stewart graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a BS in Electrical Engineering.
David Hobson Myers, PhD, serves on the faculty of the Perella Department of Finance where he teaches undergraduate and graduate investments courses. Professor Myers' main areas of research are in pension funds, mutual funds, performance measurement, conditional asset pricing, portfolio strategies, Japanese markets, international investing, and asset-liability modelling. His work has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, Operations Research, and Interfaces. Prior to joining the faculty at Lehigh, Professor Myers spent 10 years working for investment research firms in New York and Tokyo.
Tania Neild runs InfoGrate, a consulting boutique specializing in financial data. From single family offices to private banks, Dr. Neild and her team have built successful financial-service platforms, including a separately managed account platform recognized byForbes as the "Best of the Web" in 2001 and a high wealth data consolidator has been noted by many as the one of the most flexible portfolio accounting and performance reporting platform of 2005. She earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in computer engineering.