Arabesque Partners

History

Arabesque was developed at Barclays Bank PLC between 2011 and 2013 in partnership with the universities of Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge and Maastricht, together with the Fraunhofer Society.

The company was established as a partnership in 2013 through a management buyout of all rights and intellectual property.

Organisation

Arabesque Asset Management Ltd is regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Arabesque (Deutschland) GmbH is based in Frankfurt with a focus on research, programming and advisory.

Arabesque was founded by Omar Selim, who is the Chief Executive Officer based in London. He was formerly Head of Global Markets for institutional clients in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe at Barclays Bank PLC.

In June 2015, leading Harvard academic Dr Robert Eccles was appointed as the first chairman of Arabesque. Dr Eccles, who is also Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, is one of the original founders of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and also a member of International Integrated Reporting Council, a global not-for-profit organisation, incorporated in England and Wales.

In August 2015, Georg Kell was announced as Vice Chairman-designate of Arabesque. Kell was the founding Executive Director of the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest voluntary corporate sustainability initiative with over 8,000 corporate signatories from more than 160 countries.

He also oversaw the conception and launch of the Global Compact’s sister initiatives on investment, the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), and on education, the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), together with the Sustainable Stock Exchanges (SSE) initiative.

Arabesque’s Advisory Board includes; Professor Gordon L Clark, Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford; Professor Dr Rob Bauer, Professor of Finance, Maastricht University SBE; Professor Dr Michael Griebel, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI; Professor David Tuckett, Director of the UCL Centre for the Study of Decision-Making Uncertainty, Faculty of Brain Sciences and Professor Philip Treleaven, Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL).

Arabesque Asset Management is a registered member of the UN Global Compact, the UK Sustainable Investment and Finance Association (UKSIF) and the European Investment Forum (EUROSIF).

Investment Strategy

Since its inception, Arabesque has been focused on developing investments that are aligned to the UN Global Compact, the UN PRI and the AAOIFI standards.

The firm’s investment strategy uses extra-financial (ESG) information to improve portfolio quality and deliver financial outperformance. The investment process combines ESG criteria with fundamental analysis and portfolio and risk management.

Research

In September 2014, Arabesque partnered with the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford to release a report entitled ‘From the Stockholder to the Stakeholder’.

The enhanced meta-study cites over 190 sources and identifies a correlation between high Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) quality and financial performance.

In January 2015, a case study on the CEO of Arabesque, Omar Selim, was published by George Serafeim and Rebecca Henderson at Harvard Business School, and was taught to MBA students at Harvard Business School.

Awards

In February 2015, Arabesque’s Systematic Fund was awarded ‘Die Fondsinnovation des Jahres 2015’ (Fund Innovation 2015) by Boerse.

In July 2015, Arabesque won Euromoney's Global Investor/ ISF Investment Excellence award for 'SRI Manager of the Year 2015'.