Welt.de, PS Welt, Auto News
Georg Kell, Gesche Joost, and Michael Sommer are among the members of the Volkswagen Sustainability Council
Source: VW
Two years ago, Volkswagen created a Sustainability Council to help the company become future-fit. The Council’s first interim report was just released.
Följ inte den populistiska strömmen, uppmanar Georg Kell. Foto: Alex Brandon
Dagens Industri, 28 November 2018
Finanssektorn har börjat flytta kapital i en hållbar riktning, enligt Georg Kell, ordförande för kapitalförvaltaren Arabesque och grundare och före detta vd för FN:s Global Compact.
By Beverly Chandler, AlphaQ.world
Dr Yasin Rosowsky is Head of Artificial Intelligence Research at Arabesque, the ESG asset management firm that uses machine learning and big data to evaluate the performance and sustainability of listed companies.
Arabesque featured in an interview in AlphaQ with its founder and CEO, Omar Selim, back in 2015. At the time, he spoke about the firm’s proprietary technology Arabesque S-Ray, a tool that allows investors to monitor the sustainability performance of approximately 7,000 listed corporations worldwide.
By leveraging machine learning and big data, S-Ray’s technology systematically combines over 200 ESG metrics with news signals from over 50,000 sources across 15 languages enabling greater transparency into corporate behaviour and management.
“S-Ray takes the inspiration of its name from the impact the X-Ray had on medicine”, says Rosowsky. “It’s our way of looking beneath the surface of a company, and analysing its non-financial information.”
Arabesque S-Ray is the first tool of its kind to rate companies on the normative principles of the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative established by the late UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2000 with Georg Kell, who is now Arabesque’s Chairman.
One of the main features of S-Ray is that the tool works in almost real time, updating scores and incorporating news-based information through over 30,000 media articles daily.
“Our mission as a firm has always been to mainstream sustainable investment, so we took a decision two years ago to make our S-Ray technology available to the market. We opened it up,” Rosowsky says. “We now provide the scores to other institutional investors and managers who want aggregated, streamlined ESG data at the touch of a button, and to corporations who want to integrate sustainability information into their decision-making processes.”
The firm licenses its S-Ray data scores to a wide range of clients across the global financial landscape, including State Street, BNY Mellon, the Japanese Government Pension Fund and FactSet.
“The integration of sustainability across all of our investment processes is in part aimed at minimising tail risk events,” Rosowsky says. “It’s not necessarily a generator of short term price behaviour, but can be a good indicator of issues within a company and long-term risk-adjusted returns. Some of the biggest corporate scandals in recent years have been picked up by S-Ray, therefore eliminating those companies automatically from our investment universe.”
Another key component of Arabesque’s flagship Systematic strategy is a sophisticated portfolio optimisation method where 1,600 signals per stock are analysed to determine its strength, together with market momentum. A risk management system is built in, which allocates between cash and equity to balance exposure to fluctuations in the market.
“The quantitative, rules-based strategy looks at momentum, with our technology able to extract a good indication of where the trends lie. The risk management system helps us to minimise drawdowns,” he says.
The long-only Arabesque Systematic, a UCITS fund, has returned +10.22 per cent per annum since inception in 2014, and has been awarded a 5-star Morningstar Rating. Last year, the firm also launched Arabesque Systematic USA, a 40 Act fund that applies the same investment strategy to listed US equities.
The last couple of years have seen Arabesque working on building a new artificial intelligence (AI) engine, with the aim of launching a new fund based on that engine.
“At its core, it is a massively distributed network, which connects many different data sources with algorithmic models and machine learning algorithms. Its focus is to answer a single question: ‘should we invest in this stock or not?’ We ask our engine to look at the vast array of complex relationships exhibited within the financial markets and come up with investment decisions.”
The network has over a billion nodes, and engrained within each node are fundamental data, market data, analysts’ reports, and price information. All nodes are connected and are constantly processing.
“It’s computing in six different data centres around Europe to come up with the investment decisions,” Rosowsky explains. “Currently, this represents 1,000 machines working concurrently but we have capacity for 10,000 plus due to its seamlessly scalable architecture.”
“This is new,” Rosowsky says. “It is an evolving and adapting system. Our long-term goal is general AI.”
Narrow AI is the type of machine learning algorithms that solve a very specific problem, but general AI is what many people first think of when you say ‘artificial intelligence’, with computers approaching human intelligence.
“Many people are now embracing AI and entrusting it in their own lives, whether it is in transportation, security or infrastructure, or at home through something like Alexa or Google Home. And we are seeing the beginnings of this now in the investment world too.”
El Pais, 19 July 2018
EVG PEXELS
Este miércoles 18 de julio ha empezado a andar el primer think tank para impulsar el talento femenino en el ámbito económico, como lo denomina la presidenta y fundadora de la Fundación Woman Forward, Mirian Izquierdo. Los objetivos de este foro de pensamiento en el que participan cerca de una treintena de directivos son sensibilizar a los líderes empresariales de la necesidad de promover la presencia de la mujer en los puestos de máxima responsabilidad en las empresas españolas y así poder cumplir con la cuota del 30% que marca la Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV) para 2020.
Wednesday, July 18th, marked the inception of Woman Forward, a think tank for boosting the talents of women in business, with Mirian Izquierdo as President and Founder. The objective of this new think tank, in which about thirty executives participate, is to sensitize business leaders to the need for promoting women to top leadership positions in Spanish companies, and thus be able to comply with the 30% quota set for 2020 by the National Securities Market Commission, a Spanish government agency responsible for the financial regulation of the securities markets.
Para empezar, “los Principios para el Empoderamiento de las Mujeres están asociados al lema La igualdad es un negocio”, tal y como recuerda frecuentemente el director del Pacto Global de Naciones Unidas, Georg Kell. De hecho, España podría mejorar entre un 15% su PIB hasta 2025 con la incorporación paritaria del talento femenino, según las investigaciones de McKinsey, obteniendo 110.000 millones de euros adicionales hasta 2025, explica Ana Guzmán, consejera delegada de Aberdeen Management para el sur de Europa.
For starters, "The Principles for the Empowerment of Women go hand-in-hand with the slogan 'Equality Means Business", as often mentioned by Georg Kell, Founder of the United Nations Global Compact. In fact, Spain could improve its GDP by 15% until 2025 with the equal participation of female talent, according to studies by McKinesy, thus gaining an additional 110,000 million Euros until 2025, explains Ana Guzman, CEO of Aberdeen Management for Southern Europe.
The article is in Spanish
PRNewsire.co.uk, 18 May 2018, NEWS PROVIDED BYArabesque
LONDON, May 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --
Arabesque today announced an agreement to provide the world's largest pension fund, the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), with ESG data through its proprietary technology Arabesque S-Ray®.
(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/604920/Arabesque_Logo.jpg )
S-Ray® is an algorithm-based tool that analyses the sustainability performance of the world's largest listed corporations using self-learning quantitative models and data scores, and will be used for ESG measurement by GPIF.
The technology works by systematically combining over 500 ESG metrics with news signals from over 50,000 sources across 15 languages. It is the first tool of its kind to rate companies on the normative principles of the United Nations Global Compact: Human Rights, Labour Rights, the Environment, and Anti-Corruption (GC Score). Additionally, S-Ray® provides an industry-specific assessment of companies' performance on financially material sustainability criteria (ESG Score). Both scores are combined with a preferences filter that assesses a company's business involvements.
With USD $1.4 trillion under management, GPIF is increasing its commitment to ESG investment having become a signatory to the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) in 2015.
Georg Kell, Chairman of Arabesque, said: "Driven by investor demand, technology and big data, ESG investing is gaining momentum globally, and particularly in Japan. We are delighted that the Government Pension Investment Fund will utilise Arabesque S-Ray®, our ESG data aggregator tool, to measure and analyse the impact of its portfolios going forward. GPIF is highly influential across the region and internationally, and their shift towards ESG integration will be noted by investors around the world."
John Ruggie, Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, said: "ESG investing is one of the fastest growing segments in the investment universe, as innovative investors have come to realize that concern for profits, people and the planet form an intricate and mutually reinforcing ecosystem. By using Arabesque S-Ray®, GPIF will put itself in a position to stay ahead of the pack."
Notes to editors
For more information on Arabesque S-Ray®, please visit http://www.arabesque.com/s-ray
Arabesque is regulated by the FCA in London.
SOURCE Arabesque
we principles.org (Women Empowerment Principles)
(New York, 9 March 2015) – Stock exchanges from around the world joined UN Women, UN Global Compact and theSustainable Stock Exchanges (SSE) Initiative to ring their opening or closing bells in support of gender equality and to highlight the pivotal role of the private sector in empowering women in the workplace, marketplace and community.
“From Bombay to New York, bells are ringing for gender equality,” said Georg Kell, Executive Director, UN Global Compact. “As an organizer of both the WEPs and the SSE initiative, the UN Global Compact is encouraged to see exchanges, companies, investors, Governments and the UN coming together to take on this critical issue of gender equality. If we are to ensure women's full and effective participation, and equal opportunity at all levels of political, economic and public life, we need the full commitment and collaboration of all stakeholders.”