Dr. Michael Viehs

Michael is the Head of ESG integration for all investment strategies at the International Business of Federated Hermes in London. As part of that role, he is making sure that the investment teams and the stewardship team have incisive ESG and sustainability information at hand to make better investment and engagement decisions for all of Hermes’ clients. Furthermore, he is responsible for the ESG research activities, proving the value-add from incorporating ESG information in investment decision.

Michael is still conducting executive- and board-level corporate engagements on environmental, social, governance (ESG), and strategic issues with German publicly listed corporations. Michael is also a Honorary Research Associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Before his appointment at Hermes in 2015, Michael was Research Director at University of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

His work on responsible investment, corporate governance, and stewardship has been published in Corporate Governance: An International Review and Annals of Social Responsibility. Amongst others, he is co-author of the widely recognised study “From the Stockholder to the Stakeholder - How Sustainability Can Drive Financial Outperformance” and contributed a chapter on active ownership to the recently published book “Re-Imagining Capitalism” (Oxford University Press) edited by Dominic Barton, Dezsö Horvath, and Matthias Kipping.

Michael holds a B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. from Maastricht University, School of Business and Economics in the Netherlands.

Michael presented his work on responsible investing at several academic and industry conferences around the world.