Our Speakers

Georg Kell is Chairman of Arabesque, a technology company using AI and big data to assess sustainability performance for investment analysis and decision making. He was a founder and the Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact, established in 2000 and today the world's largest corporate sustainability initiative, with over 25,000 participating companies from 167 countries. During a career of almost three decades at the United Nations, working directly with former Secretaries-General Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, Georg built the Global Compact and oversaw the launch of its sister initiatives: the Principles for Responsible Investment in 2005, now with over 5,000 signatories worldwide; the Principles for Responsible Management Education in 2007, working with 850 business schools in 96 countries; and the Sustainable Stock Exchanges initiative in 2009, which engages over 130 exchanges. He is currently Co-Chair of the DWS asset management ESG Advisory Board and Speaker of the Volkswagen Sustainability Council. Georg began his career as a research fellow in engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and worked as a financial analyst in Africa and Asia before joining the United Nations in 1987. He holds advanced degrees in economics and engineering from the Technical University of Berlin.