A savings account has a talent for looking uneventful. Money arrives, a balance changes, and the owner goes back to work. Stéphan Morency has built much of his career around what happens beyond that small, reassuring number. Somewhere, the money becomes a decision: which enterprise gets financed, which building gets renovated, which piece of land remains available to a farmer. The statement in the mailbox is only the first page of the story.
In April 2026, Morency became president and chief executive officer of Fondaction and the combination of Fondaction and Bâtirente. He arrived at the job after years of developing investment tools with distinctly physical consequences. His working world includes carbon projects, industrial energy consumption, agricultural property and urban redevelopment. These are subjects that tend to resist a tidy presentation slide. A field has weather. A factory has a production schedule. Both have bills.
“Finance can and must serve the common good,” he said when his appointment was announced. The interesting part of that sentence is the verb. Serving requires doing something useful. His career provides a series of attempts to make that obligation concrete, through the unglamorous machinery of portfolios, partnerships and ownership.
“Finance can and must serve the common good.”STÉPHAN MORENCY · APRIL 2026
Before the funds, two businesses
Morency’s early professional itinerary was recognizably financial. From 1995 to 1998, he worked in corporate finance analysis at Samson Bélair Deloitte & Touche. He then became a portfolio director at Desjardins Capital de risques, staying until 2001. He holds a bachelor of commerce from Concordia University, with training in finance and business law. Numbers and the rules surrounding them supplied his professional foundation.
Then he crossed to the other side of the investment conversation. Between 2001 and 2006, he was cofounder and president of Othentika. From 2007 to 2009, he was cofounder and senior vice-president for corporate strategy at Amuse. Those eight years place entrepreneurship between his early investment work and his later institutional career. He had experience building businesses as well as evaluating them.
In 2009, he joined Fondaction as a portfolio director. Subsequent appointments brought him through senior portfolio management and deputy investment leadership to chief investment officer in May 2019. It was a gradual accumulation of responsibility inside an organization devoted to connecting retirement savings with Quebec’s economic development. The ladder was conventional; the things being built alongside it were rather less so.
The energy bill that pays for its own repair
Consider SOFIAC, the financing and support company for energy performance developed by Fondaction and Econoler. Officially launched in January 2021, it addresses a practical difficulty: an enterprise may benefit from using less energy while lacking the money, time or technical capacity to undertake the work. A worthwhile renovation can spend an impressive amount of time waiting to become affordable.
SOFIAC’s model combines technical support with financing. Projects are paid for through a share of the savings they generate, allowing the beneficiary to retain part of the savings as well. At launch, its offer targeted companies spending more than C$1 million annually on energy. The expense that originally looked like a drain on the business becomes part of the means of improving it.
Morency is credited with helping create SOFIAC. The mechanism offers a useful view of his investment interests: identify an obstacle, then change the financial arrangement around it. The engineering still matters. So does the contract that permits the engineering to happen. Even an efficient boiler needs somebody to make the arithmetic agreeable.
Carbon has a cash flow, too
Inlandsis takes the same appetite for financial design into carbon markets. The fund finances projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, with carbon credits providing a means of remuneration. Morency helped establish the original fund; its successor extended the approach to additional environmental markets and natural-capital protection.
In December 2022, Fondaction Gestion d’actifs and Priori-T Capital announced that Inlandsis II had mobilized more than C$115 million. The fund set a goal of reducing 24 million tonnes of greenhouse gases over ten years. That figure describes its ambition, rather than a completed environmental result. Its activities included financing emissions-reduction projects and expanding into voluntary carbon markets.
Projects discussed at the announcement included reducing methane emissions in agriculture and abandoned coal mines. Here the investment story leaves the pleasant abstraction of “green finance” and enters places with difficult industrial legacies. Morency described a broader role for biodiversity and natural capital in the second fund. Financial returns and environmental outcomes were being joined through a specific revenue mechanism, with the quality of the underlying projects carrying the weight.
Capital mobilized for Inlandsis II at its December 2022 announcement.
24 million tonnes of GHG reductions over 10 years was the fund’s stated target.A farmer can rent a future
Land presents a different sort of problem. A farm needs access to soil, but buying that soil can absorb resources needed to operate the business. The Fiducie agricole UPA-Fondaction, which Morency helped develop and where he has served as a trustee, acquires agricultural land to preserve its vocation in perpetuity and lease it over the long term. Ownership and cultivation can follow different paths.
The trust’s projects make the idea tangible. At Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pérade, a 24-hectare property supports an agricultural business incubator administered by the MRC des Chenaux. At Hébertville, 57 hectares are leased to Ferme Tournevent. The latter arrangement secures land access while allowing the farm to direct more financial resources toward food-processing activities.
There is a quietly radical quality to an organization that explicitly stays out of the agricultural land-resale market. The objective is continued use, with the property’s agricultural purpose protected. For a financier accustomed to assessing assets, the question becomes how an asset can remain useful across generations. A farm lease turns out to be a fairly substantial piece of social architecture.
Building the institution behind the instruments
Fondaction Gestion d’actifs, launched in 2022, gave these specialized approaches an institutional home. Morency became its executive board chair. By early 2024, its fund platforms totalled more than C$455 million across energy transition, natural capital, environmental markets and the circular economy. The underlying proposition was to draw larger pools of capital toward defined environmental and social problems.
Other people are central to this story. Marc-André Binette brought experience in sustainable real estate and social infrastructure to FGA’s leadership, working alongside Patrick Cabana. In April 2024, Claire Bisson succeeded Morency as Fondaction’s chief investment officer when he moved into a newly created executive vice-president role for strategic initiatives. The work was becoming broader, and the division of responsibility changed with it.
His responsibilities subsequently included strategy and planning for the Fondaction-Bâtirente combination. When he took over from Geneviève Morin in April 2026, he inherited a transition that had been prepared over two years. The new role connected the investment structures he had helped build with the people whose savings made such structures possible.
The awkward questions are part of the job
Morency has also worked on the conditions that allow impact investment to spread beyond a single institution. He contributed to the Canadian Impact Investing Working Group and wrote the foreword to its report on mobilizing asset owners. That work examined barriers including knowledge, capacity and the relationship between impact investing and fiduciary duty. Good intentions still have to pass through an investment committee.
His public conversations address the difficulty rather than merely the promise. A 2025 Finance in action episode with Meriem Mehdaoui explored investment selection, grey areas and the compromises between societal values and performance expectations. Earlier interviews covered finding purpose in work and making sustainable development central to investment. The questions recur because the decisions recur.
In a Quebec discussion about financing built heritage, Morency emphasized documenting a project’s benefits while developing its profitability and financial indicators. That pairing is revealing. Affection for an old building does not automatically fund its preservation. Someone must show how the project works economically, while making the public benefit legible. The spreadsheet is invited to the cultural conversation, and expected to behave.
His civic commitments extend to chairing the board of Multitudes, which supports democratic participation in Quebec, and previously chairing the community organization L’Itinéraire. He is also a member of the Global Impact Investing Network’s Investors’ Council. The circles overlap: community organizations, institutional investors and international discussions about the purposes of capital.
More people on the other side of the statement
By September 2026, Morency was describing the next stage in terms of savers’ power. At Fondaction’s annual meeting, he spoke of reaching hundreds of thousands, then millions of people who wanted greater control over their savings. The organization’s plans included broader savings options and closer dialogue with shareholders and engaged networks.
That month, he announced Steven Guilbeault’s appointment as executive adviser on climate, biodiversity and the social and ecological transition. The combined group reported more than C$6 billion in funds and assets under management, serving nearly 250,000 people. These are collective resources and collective responsibilities. Their scale makes the choice of projects more consequential, rather than making the choices disappear.
Fondaction itself reported C$4.54 billion in net assets at May 31, 2026, with 229,186 shareholders. Its annual shareholder return was 9.2 percent, excluding tax credits. That period mostly preceded Morency’s arrival as CEO, so the result belongs to the institution and its teams. His challenge is to carry the financial discipline forward while enlarging the uses to which that discipline can be put.
A savings statement will continue to look reassuringly dull. Morency’s work asks its owner to imagine the activities behind the balance: less energy consumed, land available for cultivation, capital committed to an emissions-reduction project. The second life of the savings account begins there, where a private provision for tomorrow becomes a decision about the tomorrow other people will inhabit.