Our Story

Civex was founded by Mike Mattera, John Armstrong, and Tim Keane who collectively have over 50 years of industry experience in financial services.  The trio spent the last decade working together at Legg Mason Global Asset Management as senior business, technology, and marketing executives.

As industry veterans, Mike, John, and Tim witnessed firsthand the growing interest in responsible investing – otherwise known as ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and the resulting emergence of new products to address the need. While clearly a step in the right direction, they saw the adoption of ESG investments to be very slow and with questionable effectiveness because ESG funds represent such a small fraction of the investable universe.  Furthermore, ESG investing is exclusionary in nature because it avoids investing in the companies which arguably may need the most change.  Finally, research showed that many investors, while passionate about important issues in our world, didn’t see the link between how their investments and right to vote could realistically be used to influence change.