When Dave Allen’s professional rugby career was cut short by injury, he threw himself into finance, earning a PhD at Cambridge that has influenced billions of dollars of assets and led to a new sustainable investment fund back in Australia.

After school, I studied at Sydney University and did a commerce degree but at the same time I was playing rugby at Easts through the Colts then three years of first grade, where I was part of the team that won 15 consecutive matches in 2000, which is still a record over the 122 years of the club.

In 2001, I got a contract to play rugby professionally in Ireland with Ulster but I managed to injure my neck and had to hang up the boots – which in retrospect was probably a blessing in disguise! I went to London and got a job with JP Morgan. I had an incredible mentor there with a PhD in artificial intelligence who took me under his wing, but he left the business and it meant I became Head of Research in 2009, far earlier than I should have. I was the youngest managing director JP Morgan had had.

I’d always wanted to do a PhD so I started that at Cambridge which was an incredibly special experience. I did tutorials with my professor in Isaac Newton’s old rooms and you could actually see the apple tree! The PhD was in quantitative finance, investigating better ways of managing the risk of portfolios. Financial theory assumes people are rational and markets aren’t driven by fear and greed, but in reality that’s not the case, so if you abandon those assumptions, you need to use statistics borrowed from the natural sciences, like ‘how frequent are forest fires?’. So I went back to JP Morgan and we rolled out those more sophisticated models and applied them across about $100 billion in assets as a better way of managing and measuring risk.

I met my wife Peta in London and we have two beautiful girls two and six months old, and we wanted to come back to Australia. So now I’m partnering with a group called Plato Investment Management and I’ve just launched a new fund and it has a zero-carbon footprint, enabling investors to invest in a more sustainable fashion. The average self-managed super fund has a carbon footprint equivalent to flying between Sydney and Melbourne 77 times a year, so this fund is trying to be part of the solution.

Running with the Beasts

When Michael Turtle (OC 1998) arrives at Easts Rugby Club to meet Dave Allen, the home team is
down by 42 points and there’s not much chance they’re going to pull off a win today. “We’ll build from this,” the Old Cranbrookian says philosophically. “We’ll learn from this and build.”

If there’s anyone who knows how to help Easts do that, it’s Dave Allen, who started coaching the Colts when he got back from overseas recently and then took over as Club President in 2021. It’s a homecoming of sorts, to a club where he played for years, including the winning Centenary Match against Sydney University in 2000, which he considers one of his fondest memories.

Easts is the beating heart of the community – it provides a grass roots connection.

Dave Allen (OC 1996)

“I definitely fell in love with the club. So many of my best friends to this day are friendships that were made playing on that field and in the clubhouse afterwards,” he says. Easts is 122 years old and has produced 75 Wallabies. There are 650 juniors currently at the club, as well as ten senior teams. But Dave acknowledges the “elephant in the room” – the club hasn’t won the premiership, known as the Shute Shield, since 1969. Changing that is one of his main goals.

“We’re definitely going to drive the rugby performance harder. So, for example, one of the first things that I did after becoming president was bring in two New Zealand coaches from the Crusaders Academy, which is the number one rugby academy in the world.”

There’s always been a strong connection between Cranbrook and the club, so perhaps it’s no surprise to find the club’s CEO is another former Easts player and Old Boy Dom Remond (OC 1982). He joined in 2020 after a two-decade career in sports and entertainment, including roles as the longest serving general manager of the Sydney Sixers in the Big Bash League, and CEO of a startup in esports, the competitive video gaming industry.

Dom Remond (OC 1982), Easts CEO, with Dave.

As we stand on the sideline, watching a game, he tells me that he’s been working hard to make the club more accessible to everyone, including families and young people. “For us, it’s about more than just the footy, and we’ve got a really good venue. If you’d come 20 or 30 years ago, it was a pretty old pub with terrible carpeted floors and poker machines. Now it’s a really good pub with great food and an affordable offering for people.”

The changes are noticeable straight away, and it’s interesting to discover that it’s a venue where people now hold birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and even weddings. In other words, Easts is “the beating heart of the community”, according to Dave. “I think in this digital world that we live in, people are yearning for a bit of community and grass roots connection, and the club, which is a not-for-profit, can provide that,” he says.

As well as plenty of Old Cranbrookians from across the generations cheering on the players, there are kids getting their faces painted, a popular pop-up wine bar, and locals dropping by to enjoy the atmosphere. If you haven’t been for a while, there’s never been a better time to visit.

Dave Allen was Captain of the Cranbrook School 1st XV in 1996. Seated front row.