Georg Kell on the evolution of the U.N. Global Compact and the future of corporate responsibility

Georg Kell is Chairman of Arabesque, a technology company that uses AI and big data to assess sustainability performance relevant for investment analysis and decision making. He was one of the founders and the Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact. Established in 2000, today the Global Compact is the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative with over 25,000 participating companies and organizations from 167 countries and 64 country networks. During his career of almost three decades at the United Nations, working directly with former Secretary Generals Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, Georg built the UN Global Compact and over saw the launch if its sister initiatives:

• the Principles for Responsible Investing (PRI) in 2005 – which has over 5,000 signatories from asset owners, asset managers and service providers around the world.
• the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) in 2007 – which works with 850 business and management schools in 96 countries.  
• the Sustainable Stock Exchanges (SSE) in 2009 – which engages with over 130 stock exchanges.

He is currently Co-Chair of the DWS asset management ESG Advisory Board and Speaker of the Volkswagen Sustainability Council. Georg started his career as a research fellow in engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology and Innovation in Berlin. He then worked as a financial analyst in various African and Asian countries before joining the United Nations in 1987. Georg Kell holds advanced degrees in economics and engineering from the Technical University of Berlin."