Alex Edmans – Keynote Speaker

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. He is an expert in corporate governance, purposeful business, sustainable investing, practical investment strategies, behavioural finance, and time management.

Alex has a unique combination of deep academic rigour and practical business experience. He is particularly noted for his ability to present complex concepts in non-technical language and an engaging, dynamic manner. Alex Edmans has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and the TEDx talks The Pie Growing Mindset and The Social Responsibility of Business, with a combined 2.5 million views.

Edmans is a leading figure in the reform of business to serve wider society. The UK government appointed him (jointly with PwC) to study the effect of share buybacks on investment and executive pay. He serves on the Steering Group of The Purposeful Company (which seeks to embed purpose into the heart of business), as a non-executive director of The Investor Forum (which promotes collaborative engagement between investors and companies), and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. He is frequently interviewed on TV and in the media, and has written several articles for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Harvard Business Review. His book, “Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit”, was named to the Financial Times Books of the Year for 2020 and has been or is being translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish. He is a co-author of “Principles of Corporate Finance”, with Brealey, Myers, and Allen.

Alex Edmans is also Mercers School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, giving four public lecture series on “How Business Can Better Serve Society”, “Business Skills for the 21st Century”, “The Psychology of Finance”, and “The Principles of Finance”. Alex began his professional career at Morgan Stanley in investment banking (London) and fixed income sales and trading (New York). After a PhD in Finance from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar, he became a finance professor at Wharton, where he was granted tenure. He has won 23 teaching awards at Wharton and LBS, and was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.