Belgium - Greet Poulmans

Greet Poulmans has been the president of Belsif, the Belgian Social and Sustainable Investment Forum, since August 2008.

She studied economics at the University of Louvain in Belgium. She also obtained a Master of Arts in Economics at the same university.

After her graduation she started to work at the university (she studied the impact of the high minimum wages in Belgium on the flexibility of the labour market, several articles were published). Afterwards she helped the Belgian government in analysing the competitive position of the Belgian economy in comparison to other European countries.

In 1988 Greet moved to the financial world and started working in the brand new asset management department of a government owned Belgian savings bank, called ASLK-CGER. She was bond manager and supported the sales of bond funds in the bank's network of branches. Afterwards, the bank was merged and became a private bank, called Fortis. Greet became commercially responsible for part of the network of the bank but returned to the asset management business in 2001 again. Here she was responsible for the distribution of funds in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland and Ireland.

Since September 2009 she decided to work on a half time basis and became environmental manager at Fortis Investments. Main objective is to make the different offices of the company greener (less energy, less paper, less water, less traveling,...). Besides she is responsible for the more social opportunities (charity, fair trade, ...) and for the sales and communication on the SRI-story of Fortis Investments in Belgium. In this function she is part of the SRI-workgroup of Beama (the Belgian Asset Managers Association) as well as president of Belsif. Fortis Investments joined Belsif in May 2007.