Gavin Lewis

Gavin Lewis is a Managing Director at BlackRock, where he is responsible for the strategic direction and growth of the UK Local Government Pension Scheme segment, a portion of the pensions industry that invests trillions across the UK. He previously held leadership roles at Vanguard Asset Management (Head of UK Institutional and Wholesale Distribution, Head of UK Retirement, Head of European Consultant Relations), and earlier positions at UBS Asset Management and Russell Investments. Lewis grew up on a council estate in Tottenham, attended school in working-class-white Enfield, and graduated from the University of London with a BA in History and Politics, having worked in a supermarket to fund himself through university. He worked in recruitment for the first four to five years of his career before gaining entry to the investment industry. He is co-founder of #TalkAboutBlack, the asset management industry movement dedicated to increasing the representation of Black professionals. He is a trustee of the Old Vic Theatre Trust, the NFL UK Foundation and the Pensions Policy Institute. He received the Freedom of the City of London in 2022 for services to diversity, has been recognised by the Black British Business Awards as the Senior Financial Services Professional of the Year, and was awarded the Heart of BlackRock for driving a culture of empathy, trust and respect in 2020. His 2023 book The Opportunity Index argues that inequality should be treated as a measurable investment risk alongside interest-rate, longevity, inflation and sustainability risks. His Off The Agenda appearance, in Season 2.5, co-hosted by Sir Charles Bowman and Brenda Emmanus OBE, is one of the most substantively framework-driven conversations in the corpus, anchored by Lewis’s own reflection on growing up in two worlds and operating in neither. This profile is an analyst-rated Leadership Index draft produced under the methodology introduced in Version 4.0 of the AI Future-Proofing Strategy.