Sun Life Financial has appointed veteran financial executive Marcia Moffat (pictured) to its board of directors, effective March 6.
Moffat has spent roughly 30 years in asset management, retail and investment banking and corporate law in Canada, the US and France. Most recently, she served as chief executive officer of BlackRock Asset Management Canada and country head for BlackRock in Canada. Under her leadership, BlackRock’s Canadian institutional and wealth businesses were reshaped, contributing to significant growth in assets under management and wider adoption of the firm’s Aladdin enterprise investment technology in the local market.
Before joining BlackRock, Moffat spent 12 years at Royal Bank of Canada in increasingly senior roles in capital markets, investor relations and retail banking. She began as an investment banker, arranging financing for large corporates across multiple sectors, then led RBC’s investor relations through the global financial crisis and later ran the bank’s Canadian residential mortgage and HELOC portfolio. She started her career as a corporate securities lawyer at Shearman & Sterling (now A&O Shearman) in New York and Paris, working on complex cross‑border debt and equity offerings.
Why this matters for Sun Life’s strategy
The appointment comes as Sun Life is leaning further into its capital‑light businesses and formalizing its asset‑management pillar.
Effective Jan. 1, 2026, the company created “Sun Life Asset Management” as an umbrella for MFS and SLC Management, underscoring the strategic importance of fee‑based asset management alongside its insurance and wealth operations.
As of Dec. 31, 2025, Sun Life reported total assets under management of about $1.60 trillion, with $1.15 trillion managed in its dedicated asset‑management segment (MFS and SLC Management). SLC Management has been growing in private fixed income, real estate and infrastructure for institutional and insurance clients, while MFS continues to manage global public markets strategies.
Moffat’s track record at BlackRock Canada included building out its ETF and institutional businesses and helping launch the RBC iShares alliance, which became the country’s largest ETF family with roughly 27% market share by mid‑2019. That background is likely to be relevant as Sun Life looks to deepen its own institutional and retail distribution for SLC Management and MFS, and to position itself competitively against global managers in fixed income and alternatives (including insurance‑asset mandates).
Her experience overseeing investor relations during the financial crisis, and leading a large mortgage and HELOC book at RBC, also aligns with Sun Life’s growing focus on risk, capital markets communication and balance‑sheet resilience. Sun Life’s recent results have highlighted growth in group benefits, US stop‑loss and health solutions, while also emphasizing disciplined capital deployment and acquisitions in asset management and wealth.
Given her prior role as chair of the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance and board positions at Manulife Bank and other institutions, Moffat is expected to strengthen Sun Life’s board‑level oversight on governance, investment risk and stakeholder engagement at a time when regulators and investors are paying closer attention to board composition, climate and ESG risk, and the interplay between insurance balance sheets and third‑party asset‑management businesses.
