Georg Kell is the founder of the UN Global Compact, the world's largest voluntary corporate sustainability initiative with 8,000 corporate participants in 160 countries. He led the initiative since its founding in 2000 until his retirement in September 2015. He is currently Vice Chairman of Arabesque Partners, a value‐based asset management firm and the world’s first ESG quant fund. He started his career as a research fellow in engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and then worked as a financial analyst in various countries in Africa and Asia. He joined the United Nations in 1987. He holds advanced degrees in economics and engineering from the Technical University Berlin.