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Karen Wendt

travels from Switzerland

Change Leadership and Agility for Sustainable Financial Outcomes

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About Karen

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She is a pioneer in sustainability and change leadership and transforms development into opportunities. She is an experienced financial specialist in investment, sustainability, and digital transformation. If companies want to become a better version of themselves, they need antifragility and agility as core concepts.  Speaker Karen Wendt inspires a company's overall business to strive for the implementation of success.

Why you should book speaker Karen Wendt

  • She is inspiring. Speaker Karen Wendt has led and implemented change management in two Top Tier Financial Institutions in leading roles with committee oversight.
  • Karen is an exceptional leader. Karen showcases her knowledge of banking, sustainability, innovation, digital transformation, and change management, which is directly reflected in her book and video series.
  • Her continuous skills are showcased on many platforms. Springer Palgrave Macmillan and Taylor and Francis are a few places where speaker Karen Wendt showcases her expertise. She also shows her work in CNN Money and SRF interviews and speeches.

Speaker Karen Wendt merges 20 years of experience in investment banking with social and green economy finance, leadership 4.0, design thinking, and advising on digital transformation. She is a designer and implementer of Theories of Change for business and finance. She works with clients on the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, Sustainability Strategies, and digital transformation Speaker Karen Wendt is the CEO of Eccos Impact GmbH and the editor of the Sustainable Finance Series with Springer – Palgrave- Macmillan Publishing. Karen is also the President of the SwissFinTechLadies. With her team, Karen is supporting investors, corporates, and entrepreneurs in implementing theories of change, integrating sustainability, and creating a positive impact using business intelligence to create the necessary data points to support decisions. She also develops financially viable solutions, with clients. Her publications “Theories of Change” and “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” are forthcoming in the fall of 2020.

Karen has worked as a change leader for more than 20 years in Investment Banking, where she was responsible for the development and implementation of the CEE strategy of HypoVereinsbank. She co-created Project Finance and introduced extra-financial risk management in HypoVereinsbank and UniCredit with all related policies, procedures, and management structures.

With her team, she oversaw more than 180 transactions annually, represented the management view in the Reputation Risk Committee and the Investment Committee, and co-created an internationally recognized standard for extra-financial risk management. This was based on the context factor and trend analysis, which was integrated into the internal risk rating systems of both institutions to allow an early warning system on distressed assets and to help companies to be successful in turn around management

Karen represented UniCredit / HVB in all internal and external exchanges with multilateral agencies dealing with risk management and global administrative law, including OECD, UN, World Bank, European Investment Bank, and Development Finance Institutions. As a Board Member of the Equator Principles Financial Institutions Association, she was responsible for “Stakeholder Engagement “and “Outreach.

Karen holds an MBA from the University of Liverpool and a diploma from the University of Bonn. She is a certified mediator and quality manager.

See keynotes with Karen Wendt
Keynote by speaker Wendy Wendt

Change Leadership: Rabbit holes or Elephants in the Room

While change must be well managed, it also requires effective leadership to be successfully introduced and sustained. An integrative model of leadership for change is proposed, reflecting its dimensions and requirements.

Audience takeaways:

  • The most important thing in change leadership is not just urgency, it’s social identity.
  • Create yourself as the leader that is so attractive that others want to learn you, imitate you, create identity-based trust and you can do anything. I am sharing how to create purpose and solidarity for the mission.
Keynote by speaker Karen Wendt

From the Margins to the Mainstream: Sustainable Finance, Impact Investing and Green Economy

While some years ago investors were mainly looking into risk adjusted returns, Sustainability has found its way into mainstream investing in a number of ways: From smart beta strategies to norms-based screening, environmental and social governance inclusion or carbon at risk calculations.

Audience takeaways:

  • This keynote will guide you through the benefits and trade-offs of each strategy and its pros and cons.
Keynote by speaker Karen Wendt

Change Management: EQ versus IQ: Translating Change into organizational commitment

Create urgency, but also bring stability to the phase of change. H ow to create a positive movement. Do the right thing and get the teams aligned. What a good change management process looks like and how to overcome challenges.

Audience takeaways:

  • Lessons from C-Suite in Change Management.
  • What are the specialties in change management in digital companies and how to unblock situations
Keynote by speaker Karen Wendt

Business Foresight Leverage Points and Digital Transformation:  the 7 Qualities of a Digital Leader

Inspire your vision and strategy on digital transformation. Based on a range of future scenarios and trends in digitalization Karen demonstrates how to define how to transform the scenarios into an attractive vision and strategy. Have you ever used leverage point analysis as a tool for understanding your options?

Audience takeaways:

  • The 7 personal qualities and how they must match organization qualities
Keynote by speaker Karen Wendt

From Green and Black Swans: Using Leverage Point Analysis for implementing Sustainability.

From Risk Management to Opportunity Recognition and Strategy Execution: How to combine leverage point analysis with a long-term vision and translated into actionable business solutions helping companies to become sustainable, abide by international frameworks, global administrative law, and mitigate risk. Transforming uncertainty into business opportunities early on.

Audience takeaways:

  • Insights into leverage Point Analysis and unlocking the potential to sustainability in an easy inspiring way.
Keynote by speaker Karen Wendt

Impacts of the EU Action Plan for Business Owners and Asset Managers

Introduction to the EU Action Plan, the EU Taxonomy and the New Green Deal. Defining the Decision Agenda, find the easy wins, and define the most important leverage points. combining effective leadership and change management.

Audience takeaways:

  • Insights into the EU Action Plan and its impacts on business, asset management, and finance.
  • An analysis of opportunities for business. Unlocking the potential to sustainability in an easy inspiring way.
Keynote by speaker Karen Wendt

The Four Insights to Exponential Leadership: Leadership and Sustainability in the Board Room

The four insights to exponential Leadership Framework clarifying the resources and qualities of the organization for future fitness and strategic foresight to enable the organization to transform itself effectively.

Keynote by speaker Karen Wendt

The Fifths Discipline: The art of Open Banking and Open Finance

Lets share how to retain smarter banking with the help of economic ecosystems. Create customer-centric services and customer advocacy. This brings a wave of innovation to the market. Also guidelines, governance, and compliance requirements are growing.

Audience takeaways:

  • Platform Strategies, Customers Journeys Ecosystems creation.
  • Shows you how to navigate the business, market and policy disruption and create and craft your open banking and open
    finance strategy
Keynote by speaker Karen Wendt

Antifragility: How diversity helps creating it

In a crisis in particular it is important that leadership can take as many perspectives as possible to develop a resilient position, to stream through the crisis, and even become antifragile.
Antifragility is a concept that has been developed by Professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the “Black Swan”. He defines antifragility as the ability to resist failure and thrive and withstand stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. It is different from the concept of resilience, being the ability to recover from failure. It is extremely useful in environments that cannot be described any longer by systemic risk and volatility.

Audience takeaways:

  • Three strategies that make your business and yourself antifragile.

References

EBRD has invited Karen for a couples of events as a committed and inspiring speaker about topics stretching from Alternative Conflict Resolution, Risk Assessments and Management, Sustainability, Global Administrative Law, Reporting and introducing Theories of Change into investment and finance. Her speeches are dynamic, interesting and sometimes challenging the audience in a very sophisticated way. We are extremely grateful for the great collaboration and inspiration that Karen is able to instill.

Darius Prazek

Former Director EBRD, now Sustainabilty Advisor
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Keynote topics with Karen Wendt