Tailored Advice for Financial Institutions - Shift

Meeting your needs /

We combine our experience as financial services practitioners with the practical knowledge of what works at companies addressing risks to people, to deliver insight and advice that is relevant to portfolio-oriented institution

Whether you are looking to more deeply understand emerging practice in your field, engage with peers or strengthen mature systems, our support can scale from work on a specific issue to more strategic projects around due diligence processes. In all cases, we help financial institutions translate global expectations into practical, portfolio-ready approaches that improve decision-making, strengthen risk management and deliver better outcomes for people and the business.

Why Shift? /

At Shift, we’ve been working for and with financial institutions for years, pushing boundaries, testing solutions and developing a solid understanding of what effective practice looks like. Our advice is grounded in experience, shaped by engagement with leading investors and lenders, and tailored to the realities of portfolio-based institutions.

Our extensive history of working with real economy companies means we bring to our work an understanding of what moves the needle and demonstrates what is possible across industries.

We combine deep expertise in human rights and responsible business with years of experience working directly with financial institutions, their portfolio companies and the standard setters that affect their activities.
We’ve researched and designed creative solutions, tested and fine-tuned them in our one-on-one engagements with leading institutions and nurtured them through the multi-stakeholder processes that we help convene.
We understand how to tailor what we know to the specific reality and challenges of our partners.

Our core offerings /

Building Solid Foundations

Create the clarity needed for credible action

Risk Identification & Assessment

Bring a people lens to risk management

Governance & Decision-Making

Turn insight into action

Leverage & Action

Turn influence into impact

Stakeholder Engagement

Bring real-world perspectives into decision-making

Remedy

Build credible approaches to responding when things go wrong

Measurement

Understand what is effective and what is changing

Disclosure

Demonstrate progress with confidence

Building Solid Foundations

Create the clarity needed for credible action

Before systems, tools or reporting, you need to build a shared understanding of your organization’s responsibilities and what good practice looks like in reality.

We help financial institutions build the foundations for effective human rights and ESG integration by aligning leadership, sustainability teams, investment and risk functions and front-line staff around a shared understanding of expectations and responsibilities. Through tailored learning, practical guidance and ongoing support, we turn complex standards into clear, actionable approaches that work in your context.

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Our work with partners typically includes a mix of:

Executive and board briefings
Tailored training and capability-building programmes
Human rights and ESG maturity assessments
Policy and framework development
Effective measurement strategies
Cohesive disclosure

The result: an organisation that is equipped to move from commitment to implementation with confidence.

Risk Identification & Assessment

Bring a people lens to risk management

Financial institutions are experts in spotting and managing financial risk. We help add an understanding of the intersections of risks to people and financial impacts and how human rights performance drives value creation and erosion.

Our work focuses on identifying, assessing and prioritising the most severe human rights risks across portfolios, sectors and transactions. We help integrate human rights considerations into screening processes, due diligence, KYC frameworks, sector policies and risk assessment methodologies.

Rather than reinventing existing systems, we build on what is already in place—strengthening current approaches with practical tools, peer insights and leading practice.

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Our work with investors and lenders typically includes a mix of:

The result: a robust, defensible and forward-looking approach to risk that strengthens both human rights due diligence and overall risk management — minimising blind spots, focusing resources where they matter most.

Governance & Decision-Making

Turn insight into action

Strong analysis only creates value when it informs decisions. We help financial institutions design governance systems that ensure social or people-related considerations are embedded into decision-making processes.

From defining roles and responsibilities to designing escalation pathways, we help create governance that is practical, effective and used consistently.

Drawing on experience with leading institutions, we help you establish governance models that fit your culture, operating model and level of ambition.

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Our work with partners typically includes a mix of:

The Result: better decisions, stronger oversight and clearer accountability across the organisation.

Leverage & Action

Turn influence into impact

Identifying risk is only the beginning. The real challenge is determining how to use the institution’s influence to drive meaningful change.

We help investors and lenders develop practical approaches for using leverage with clients, investees, business partners and markets. Together, we design strategies, frameworks and tools that enable teams to move beyond passive risk management and take purposeful action.

For higher-risk sectors, clients and transactions, we support the development of tailored engagement strategies grounded in clear theories of change and realistic pathways to impact. In specific cases, we provide prompt and interactive analysis of how individual transactions or companies may or may not connect the bank with potential impacts on people and risk to business.

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Our work with our partners typically includes a mix of:

The result: a more proactive and effective approach to influencing outcomes for people and managing risk.

Stakeholder Engagement

Bring real-world perspectives into decision-making

An effective strategy for managing risks to people requires more than internal analysis. It requires listening to those who may be affected.

We help financial institutions develop stakeholder engagement approaches that bring external perspectives into risk assessment, due diligence and decision-making. From stakeholder mapping and relationship-building to governance processes for capturing and acting on insights, we help ensure engagement becomes a meaningful source of information—not a compliance exercise.

We also help institutions understand the latest approaches to engagement with investees and clients, and the role of direct engagement with affected stakeholders.

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Our work with partners typically includes a mix of:

Stakeholder mapping and prioritization
Understanding different forms of leverage including and beyond the commercial
Guidance on assessing and building leverage with clients
Capacity building with portfolio and relationship managers to
Engagement strategy design
Integration of stakeholder insights into decision-making
Support for high-risk transactions and contexts

The result: a more informed decisions, stronger relationships and a deeper understanding of risks and impacts.

Remedy

Build credible approaches to responding when things go wrong

Even the strongest systems cannot eliminate all risks. What matters is how institutions respond when harm occurs.

We help financial institutions understand and operationalise their role in remedy, particularly where impacts are linked to clients, investments or business relationships. We provide practical guidance on what effective remedy looks like, when action is expected and how organisations can create systems that support meaningful responses.

Our work combines emerging leading practice with practical implementation support.

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Examples of our work with partners include:

The result: a structured, credible and effective approach to remedy that aligns with evolving expectations and strengthens stakeholder trust.

Measurement

Understand what is effective and what is changing

Managing human rights risks effectively requires more than activity tracking—it requires understanding whether actions are leading to better outcomes.

We help financial institutions develop meaningful measurement frameworks that assess both implementation and effectiveness. By identifying the right indicators, data sources and feedback loops, we enable organisations to track progress, learn from experience and continually improve.

Our approach focuses on practical measurement that supports better management decisions rather than reporting for reporting’s sake.

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Our work with partners typically includes a mix of:

The result: a clearer evidence of progress, stronger management information and greater confidence that actions are delivering results.

Disclosure

Demonstrate progress with confidence

Stakeholders increasingly expect financial institutions to show not only what they commit to, but what they are doing and whether it is working.

We help organisations strengthen disclosures, so they are transparent, credible and aligned with evolving expectations. Our focus is on ensuring disclosures accurately reflect the reality of your approach, while building trust with investors, regulators, clients and civil society.

By combining benchmarking, regulatory insight and practical implementation experience, we help institutions develop disclosure strategies that evolve alongside their programmes.

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Our work with partners typically includes a mix of:

Identifying efficiencies through cohesive reporting strategies
Disclosure reviews and gap assessments
Peer and leading-practice benchmarking
Reporting strategy development
Support for regulatory and voluntary frameworks
Narrative and content development

The result: clear, credible disclosures that build trust, demonstrate progress and reinforce the strength of your overall approach.

Testimonials /

Our collaboration with Shift has helped us untangle the often complex relationships and associated human rights risks and obligations in the projects we support and our connection to them. Applying the “UNGP lens” to identification of risks and impacts through our long-established environmental and social due diligence process leads to more nuanced results and the design of more effective mitigation measures”

KfW

Shift helped us substantially in building up fundamental knowledge across the organization. Our partnership has given us confidence that we are on the right track to become the best-in-class for implementing the UNGPs.”

PGGM Investments

David Vermijs /

Director

He/Him Amsterdam

As Director, David engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

Specializes in Business Enterprises

As Director, David engages with business partners to better identify, prioritize and act on salient human rights issues, embedding the UN Guiding Principles in companies’ decision-making processes.

David has over a decade of experience advising multinational corporations, governments, NGOs and others on business and human rights. Prior to joining Shift, David provided research assistance to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for business and human rights John Ruggie. As part of his contributions, David field-tested human rights due diligence with a group of Dutch companies and their stakeholders, and he supported research on company-led grievance mechanisms.

From 2008 to 2010, David was the lead consultant on an 18-month project, the Business and Human Rights Initiative, under the umbrella of the Global Compact Network Netherlands. The initiative was a collaboration between 10 Dutch multinationals – ABN AMRO, AkzoNobel, Essent, KLM, Philips, Rabobank, Randstad, Shell, TNT and Unilever – and led to the publication of a ground-breaking business guidance tool, How to Do Business with Respect for Human Rights, in 2010. Through his work at Shift, David led the update of this publication from 2014 to 2016 with the support of the Dutch government under their National Action Plan on implementing the Guiding Principles.

Another major guidance tool David has helped develop addresses due diligence on child labor, published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Organisation of Employers (IOE) in 2015. The guidance was the result of a multi-year, multi-stakeholder, multi-country project led by David involving the ILO, IOE, companies, unions, NGOs and other stakeholders.

David was previously a Research Fellow at the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, including assisting in teaching on business and human rights, global governance, corporate governance and leadership. David sits in a personal capacity on the board of the Dutch Social and Economic Council International Corporate Social Responsibility Committee. He has a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor of Arts in Business from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. David is a Dutch national, speaks English and Dutch and is proficient in Spanish and German.

Anna Triponel /

Senior Associate

She/Her London

As a Senior Associate with Shift, Anna advises companies, lawyers, investors and business associations on how to put the Guiding Principles into practice.

As a Senior Associate with Shift, Anna advises companies, investors and business associations on how to put the Guiding Principles into practice. Trained as a lawyer, Anna focuses particularly on working with legal professionals on their role in implementing the Guiding Principles and has led work on analyzing regulations in various jurisdictions and how they align to the Guiding Principles. She also has particular expertise on the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework.

Prior to joining Shift, Anna provided input to the work of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for business and human rights John Ruggie as a legal consultant. During this period, Anna also opened the New York office of the Public International Law & Policy Group, where she advised government officials, opposition leaders, human rights victims and civil society organizations on human rights, constitutional reform and transitional justice in Burma, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Somaliland, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Anna was previously a mergers and acquisitions associate at the law firm of Jones Day in New York, where she advised a broad range of multinational companies on cross-border mergers and acquisitions, joint venture, private equity and venture capital transactions. She founded and led the law firm’s International Law Pro Bono Group. She began her career as an advisor to the World Bank, advising on development governance structures to better meet the Millennium Development Goal of achieving universal primary education.

Anna is a (non-practicing) lawyer qualified in New York, England & Wales and France. She is a frequent expert speaker and writer on business and human rights and is the recipient of various professional awards, including the Empire State Counsel Award for changing the lives of those unable to afford counsel and the Seymour-Reuben Award for shaping international law. Anna has a Masters in International Law from American University Washington College of Law and a degree in common and civil law from the University of Paris X. She has been awarded the Business Sustainability Management certificate from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and the MBA Essentials certificate from London School of Economics (LSE). Anna is a British and French national and speaks English and French.

Ashleigh Owens /

Director | Financial Institutions Lead

She/Her New York City

As Shift’s Director / Financial Institutions Lead, Ashleigh leads our work with financial institutions and supports other partners across industries, leveraging her breadth of experience to tackle cutting-edge issues and entrenched challenges on the road to implementation of the UN Guiding Principles.

Specializes in Financial Institutions | Valuing Respect

As Director / Financial Institutions Lead, Ashleigh engages directly with financial institutions, companies and investors as they embed respect for human rights into their operations and business relationships. She also leads on pieces of research under our Valuing Respect Project, which is focused on developing better ways to evaluate business respect for human rights. Ashleigh has a breadth of experience approaching the Guiding Principles from business, legal and academic perspectives and brings a holistic view to Guiding Principles implementation.

Ashleigh was previously Executive Director at Ernst & Young’s Climate Change and Sustainability Services. At EY Japan, she led a team of consultants supporting policy-making, educational program and governance design, stakeholder dialogue and due diligence strategies for multinational and domestic companies across a variety of industries. As founder of the EY Human Rights Network, she led the enhancement of EY’s human rights capabilities across EY’s global network. In her role she was a frequent speaker and moderator of dialogues at multi-stakeholder fora and functioned as a connector between civil society, government and corporate actors with a common goal of empowering business to respect rights.

From 2012 to 2014 she conducted research at the United Nations University in the field of Sustainability Science, specializing in business and human rights. She prepared research for the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights and spent time at the UN Global Compact New York and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Ashleigh later sat on the UN Global Compact’s Human Rights and Labour Working Group and drafted the Global Compact’s 2015 Guide on How to Develop a Human Rights Policy.

Ashleigh is a lawyer qualified in Australia and England & Wales and specialized in intellectual property law, labor law and public international law. She has advised governments and companies on state human rights obligations, companies on the nexus between bilateral investment treaties and human rights and fellow lawyers on integrating the Guiding Principles into legal advice. In 2007 she won the Intellectual Property Society of Australia & NZ prize.

Ashleigh has authored or contributed to a number of publications including: Business and Human Rights: Corporate Japan Rises to the Challenge (joint publication between EY Japan and Global Compact Network Japan), Corporate Social Responsibility Can Save Japan (Op-ed in Japan Times), Cumulative Human Rights Impacts (in UN Global Compact/ Maplecroft Business Dilemmas Forum) as well as several legal publications on intellectual property law in Australia and English translations of Japanese High Court judgments. She is also a member of the Advisory Board for the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)’s Division for Prosperity.

Ashleigh has degrees in Law and Asian Studies from the University of Western Australia, with studies also conducted at the University of Vienna and Sophia University in Japan. She has a Masters of Science in Sustainability from the United Nations University and has undertaken the institution’s Leadership for Sustainability program. Ashleigh is an Australian national, and is fluent in Japanese.

Rachel Davis /

Vice President and Co-Founder

She/Her Sydney

As the Vice President and Co-Founder of Shift, Rachel helps shape our strategy and oversees a range of our collaborations with companies, governments, investors, civil society and other partners. Rachel is also responsible for driving our work on standards advocacy and with sports associations.

Specializes in Standard Setters | Sports and Human Rights

Rachel is one of Shift’s co-founders and has led work at Shift over the last decade on standard-setting, human rights and sports, financial institutions, conflict and international law.

As Vice President, Rachel shapes our strategy and oversees a range of our collaborations with companies, governments, investors, civil society and other partners. Rachel leads Shift’s work to influence standard-setters of all kinds to integrate the UN Guiding Principles into the rules that govern business, including engaging with governments and the European Union on mandatory human rights due diligence.

Rachel also has unique experience advising and leading efforts to drive respect for human rights into the operations of global sports governing bodies. Rachel was the Chair of FIFA’s independent Human Rights Advisory Board while it operated, between 2017 and 2021. She has advised the International Olympic Committee on human rights since 2018, including co-authoring recommendations for the IOC on a comprehensive human rights strategy with former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein.

Rachel has more than a decade of experience in implementing the Guiding Principles with a wide range of organizations, including public and private financial institutions and companies from diverse business sectors and geographies, and she frequently leads and facilitates engagements with senior audiences around the world. She is the co-author of the leading study of the costs of company-community conflict in the extractive sector.

Prior to co-founding Shift, Rachel was a senior legal advisor from 2006-2011 to the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on business and human rights, Harvard Professor John Ruggie. She played a pivotal role in the development of the Guiding Principles, advising on all aspects of the relationship between the Guiding Principles and national and international law.

Rachel is also a Senior Program Fellow with the Corporate Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School and has experience at the highest levels of the Australian legal system and internationally, having clerked at the High Court of Australia and at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She has a particular interest in Indigenous peoples’ rights, having advised the Australian Federal Attorney-General’s Department on Indigenous affairs and acted as Ruggie’s liaison with the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues during his UN mandate.

Rachel has a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School and Bachelors degrees in Law and Politics from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where she also lectured and published in law. She is a (non-practicing) lawyer qualified in New South Wales.

Erika George /

Board Member

She/Her

Erika George is Director of the Tanner Humanities Center and Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah. She has conducted leading research and is a passionate advocate for women’s rights, children’s rights, gender equality and environmental justice.

Professor Erika R. George is the Associate Dean for Equity, Justice, & Engagement, Professor of Law, and Ernest Haddad Faculty Scholar at Boston University School of Law and a leading expert in business and human rights.

Professor George is the author of “Incorporating Rights: Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability” (Oxford University Press, 2021), which examines the evolution of demands for corporate responsibility to respect international human rights. She was a founding member of the editorial board of the Business and Human Rights Journal (Cambridge University Press) and since 2022 has served on the board of Shift.

Before joining BU Law in 2024, Professor George spent over two decades at the University of Utah as the Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law. She directed the Tanner Humanities Center for four years and worked to enhance engagement and expand and diversify audiences for public humanities programs during her tenure. She also advocated for academic freedom and the right to read. Along with the former poet laureate of Utah, she co-founded the PEN America Utah Chapter to protect access to information and prevent censorship.

Professor George is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an American Bar Foundation fellow, a trustee of Earthjustice, and serves on the Executive Board of the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights.

She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Society of American Law Teachers’ M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award and the Salt Lake City Human Rights Commission Human Rights Award.

Professor George earned her BA with honors from the University of Chicago, a MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a JD from Harvard Law School. She also clerked for Judge William T. Hart of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. She was a litigation associate at the law firm of Jenner & Block in Chicago before joining Human Rights Watch as a research fellow.

We recorded an interview with Professor George when she joined Shift’s Board in February of 2022. It is available here.

Erika George is Director of the Tanner Humanities Center and Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah. Prior to joining the University of Utah, Professor George served as a law clerk and litigation associate at prominent firms in both Illinois and New York. She also worked as a fellow and later consultant at Human Rights Watch, where she conducted investigations in South Africa on women’s rights, children’s rights, violence, the right to education and abuses related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She wrote a book-length report, Scared at School: Sexual Violence Against Girls in South African Schools, which received widespread media coverage in South Africa and internationally. She currently serves as special counsel to the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

Her scholarship has appeared in the California Law Review, the Michigan Journal of International Law, the New York University Journal of International Law and Policy, and the annual proceedings of the American Society of International Law.

Professor George has served on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Department of State Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan and as a member of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah. She is an Editor for the blog globaljusticeblog.com.

We recorded an interview with Professor George when she joined Shift’s Board in February of 2022. It is available here.

Caroline Rees /

President and Co-Founder

She/Her New York City

As Shift’s President, Caroline leads our strategic development and drives our thought leadership work on key challenges and opportunities in advancing corporate respect for business and human rights.

As the President and Co-Founder of Shift, Caroline leads our organizational strategy and development and drives our thought leadership work on key challenges and opportunities in advancing corporate respect for business and human rights. Caroline speaks extensively at events around the world and frequently facilitates dialogue and debate amongst companies, governments, investors and civil society. In recent years, Caroline has focused on improving corporate human rights reporting as a catalyst for better human rights risk management, and on improving the data and methods used in evaluating companies’ social performance as part of ESG (environmental, social and governance) analysis. She has written and spoken extensively on the relevance of business respect for human rights, and the UNGPs specifically, to movements that seek to advance sustainability, equality, ESG investing, stakeholder capitalism, and human and social capital.

Caroline previously spent 14 years with the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. From 2003 to 2006 she led the UK’s human rights negotiating team at the UN and she ran the negotiations to establish the mandate of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on business and human rights. The success of this initiative led to Professor John Ruggie’s appointment and from 2007-2011 Caroline was a lead advisor on his team and deeply involved in the drafting of the Guiding Principles.

From 2009 to 2011 Caroline was also the Director of the Governance and Accountability Program at the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School and she remains a Senior Program Fellow there. Caroline is a member of the Imperatives Board of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the Board of the Capitals Coalition, the Unilever Sustainability Advisory Council, and the Steering Committee of the Taskforce on Inequality and Social-related Financial Disclosures.

Caroline’s prior British foreign service career covered Iran, Slovakia, the UN Security Council in New York and the European Union in Brussels. Caroline has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) from Oxford University and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Caroline is a British national and speaks English, French and German.