Reframing finance: a systems-led approach to sustainable investment

Ben Caldecott is the founding Director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group at the University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment. At the University of Oxford, he is the inaugural Lombard Odier Associate Professor of Sustainable Finance, the first-ever endowed professorship of sustainable finance and a Supernumerary Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. Caldecott is also the founding Director and Principal Investigator of the UK Centre for Greening Finance & Investment (CGFI), established by UK Research and Innovation as the national centre to accelerate the adoption and use of climate and environmental data and analytics by financial institutions internationally. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Wealth Management Institute in Singapore.

Marcel Haag currently holds the position of Director for Horizontal policies at the Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union. After qualifying as a judge and a short stint in business, he joined the European Commission and worked in different Commission services. Previously, Haag served as a Director for policy coordination in the Secretariat-General of the Commission.

In her current role at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, Signe Andreasen Lysgaard serves as the focal point for the Institute’s work on human rights and finance, where she engages in policy developments, project level collaborations with financial institutions and research activities. Her work focuses on scaling up respect for human rights across the financial sector and within different financial activities. Lysgaard is a Political Scientist and has more than a decade of experience advising companies, financial institutions, governments and civil society organisations across sectors and geographies on corporate respect for human rights. Previously, she worked at the EU Platform on Sustainable Finance and continues to serve as expert advisor to a number of external bodies, including as a member of the EFRAG Sustainability Reporting Technical Expert Group and the PRI Human Rights Technical Expert Group.

In her current role of Group Chief Sustainability Officer at Generali, Lucia Silva leads the definition and the implementation of the Group Sustainability strategy and policies. A senior sustainability professional with 20 years of experience, her focus is on integrating sustainability into the business, looking at insurance products and investment strategies. Prior to joining Generali, Silva worked at KPMG, where she successfully supported various companies from a wide range of sectors in defining and developing their Sustainability strategy. During this period, she was also instrumental in the development and implementation of KPMG’s own Sustainability strategy in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa), leading an international network of colleagues.

Paul Tang currently holds the role of Member of the European Parliament for the Socialists and Democrats. He is a member of the parliamentary committees on economy and monetary affairs, budget and industry & energy. Tang has led research at the Dutch Centraal PlanBureau and contributed to the ongoing discussions on how the economic growth and the social welfare state relate to each other, worked on climate change policies and authored political-economic scenarios for Europe. Interested in the impact of political choices on the lives of people, Tang ran as MP for the Dutch Labour Party and served for four years as a spokesperson on financial and fiscal affairs. In the European Parliament, Tang battles for more jobs for Europe, a healthy financial sector at the service of society and more legitimacy for Europe.