I am pleased to confirm that BearingPoint reaffirms its support of the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact in the areas of Human Rights, Labour, Environment and Anti-Corruption.
In this annual Communication on Progress, we describe our actions to continually improve the integration of the Global Compact and its principles into our business strategy, culture and daily operations. We also commit to share this information with our stakeholders using our primary channels of communication.
We are very proud, that our people have successfully adapted to the new way of working and emerged from the crisis stronger than ever. We continue to implement our Strategy 2025 working together, and working with a purpose. We have strengthened our efforts to maximize the social impact of everything we do – within our CSR pillars of People, Planet and Society. We know that the challenges ahead are too big to be tackled by individuals, teams or single organizations – only by collaborating we can be successful. That is why we seek the exchange with our people and our external ecosystem, e.g., by participating in the SDG Ambition Program (as facilitated by the Un Global Compact) and by partnering with non-profit partners. For example, we worked together with Viva con Agua in bringing their Water project to South Africa in 2020. I am particularly proud that our people engaged in various pro bono projects and developed new applications and client offerings which aim to support the UN Global Compact’s principles. In particular, we have committed ourselves to ambitious Sustainability Goals as regards female representation and emission as part of our Strategy 2025 roadmap. It is great to see, how our people across practices contribute to make BearingPoint a sustainable place to work with!

I am personally convinced that our future success and our ability to leverage new and existing opportunities in a sustainable way depends on how consistently we live up to our values and addressing these challenges.

As a European-focused management and technology consultancy firm, we do not have direct business operations in industries which represent a higher risk for potential human rights violations. We do still however observe international human rights and related laws and regulations and pro-actively apply the UN recommendations and other international standards in this respect.
We recognise that human rights violations and modern slavery matters are still being reported in the news, including in countries BearingPoint in which BearingPoint operates.
As a technology consulting firm, we engage mainly with suppliers for IT, business support, marketing materials and office maintenance supplies and services, all areas which do not normally fall in the obvious scope of potential human rights violations.
However, given our global reach and the versatility of the business partners we work with, be it as clients, suppliers, service providers or partners, we realise that these issues concern us and this is a subject where we need to do more throughout our supply chain. As a minimum, we need to ask questions and find out where our equipment comes from.

Our Goal ….
Our goal in the remaining months of 2021 and in 2022 will be to continue Obtain ongoing assurances from our suppliers and extend the scope of our reviews to address new supply chain legislations.

Potential human rights implications are already a key element of the compliance due diligence process when engaging selected clients and third parties working for us in higher risk countries, but we must also be concerned about this throughout our supply chain.
With the creation of a firm-wide procurement function, we are including an array of different requirements, including the commitment to adhere to human rights principles in the selection process. We are currently selecting, on a risk- based approach, the number and type of existing suppliers, who will be part of this review.
We also support our clients in their commitments when selecting us as their business partner:
• Specifically, we included the Modern Slavery Act and general human rights elements into our new (Supplier) Code of Business Ethics
• Enforcement of these principles through our new Supplier Code of Business Ethics towards all our direct suppliers is managed through the firm wide procurement department
• Rollout of a mandatory Code of Business Ethics and CSR online session for all employees and selected third parties
• Specific UK Slavery face to face awareness sessions in our UK practices organized through our Group Compliance department

We are already complying with requests from clients for external assessments, for example EcoVadis or TRACE certifications, and aim to continue to deliver these successfully in the future.

In 2021, we successfully established an automated process for rolling out our Supplier Code of Business Ethics and introduces and ongoing review program for our key IT suppliers.

General and targeted trainings for employees to raise awareness and ensure compliance with dedicated principles.

BearingPoint’s success derives from the success of our people and people centricity is at the core of our growth strategy. We recognise and value the unique contributions that people with different backgrounds, experience and working styles have to offer and this enables us to interact with different cultures and global stakeholders.
We do not discriminate against anyone because of race or ethnicity, colour, gender identity, age, family status, marital status, religion, disability, national origin, sexual orientation, trade union affiliation or other legally protected status. BearingPoint’s policies and practices reflect how we value diversity, provide equality of opportunity and ensure that no job applicant, employee, client and other business partner receives less favourable treatment on any of the grounds set out above.
We strongly condemn child or forced labour and pro-actively apply the UN recommendations and other international standards in this respect. Also, we support freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining.

Our Goal ….
… is to be an inclusive firm that creates a feeling of belonging with the people working with and for us. This means that we want to bring policies to life and celebrate inclusiveness – beyond group-specific markers. We aim to make diversity, inclusion, and equality ongoing topics in internal communications, to make everyone aware of the topic – and make it everyone’s individual responsibility. In doing so, we automatically position ourselves against any form of discrimination.
We have formulated a commitment (Sustainability Goal) as regards the representation of females within BearingPoint by end of 2025.
• 40% female staff across levels
• For leadership, we aim for 20% female partners
• All country leadership teams with female representation

In 2020, we have further strengthened our governance to ensure diversity and inclusion and avoid discrimination at work respectively. Supporting our Corporate Social Responsibility manager, we have firmwide sponsors from leadership nominated. Since end of 2020, we have official sponsor in our Management Committee in CSR (including Diversity and Inclusion).
One central role of the CSR and Diversity manager is to coordinate our regional activities and to co-develop a joint diversity and inclusion approach, that reflects both firmwide objectives and regional specialities. So, one way to implement our goals is to provide a platform for regular exchange and discussion with all responsible (and otherwise supportive / engaged) people for the topic.
To promote inclusiveness, BearingPoint works with an cross-country DIVE Council (with sponsors from leadership). In addition to agenda setting, trainings and awareness interventions, we invite our people to initiate so-called affinity initiatives (also known as Employee Resource Groups).
Through our human resource recruitment, we are committed to making BearingPoint a truly inclusive organisation, where each of us can fulfil their potential and be themselves, regardless of background.
These principles are anchored in our Code of Business Ethics and supported by a specific Diversity Policy (our DIVE Policy) that People at BearingPoint are required to comply with. An essential component of BearingPoint’s corporate social responsibility is our commitment to being good corporate citizens within the communities where we do business. That is why we promote relations with providers, business partners and sub-contractors operating under the same values. We expect any third party working with or for us to apply the same.
Freedom of association is ensured across all BearingPoint’s legal entities. This is shown, for example, in existing worker’s councils or with our four employee-driven affinity initiatives, too.
We are compliant with the UK Modern Slavery Act.

With COVID-19, our as regards diversity and inclusion was on ensuring that our people – no matter their individual challenges with the pandemic situation – are safe and supported. We conducted surveys to understand their individual pressures and especially offered mental health support in diverse forms. We aimed at ensuring that isolation, additional care work and anxiety are balanced with keeping the business running.
We have integrated “Belonging” as key indicator of our BearingPoint Diversity and Inclusion actions into our regular People Survey for continuous tracking and analysis. With our People Survey from 2020, our people on average indicate a belonging score of 4.8 (out of 6).
We have four active affinity initiatives running. Beyond Women (female colleagues + allies ), Proud (LGBTQ+ colleagues + allies), Ability (colleagues with health impairments + allies), we have as a follow-up of the “black lives matter” discussions supported the foundation of MORE (Minorities of Religion and Ethnicity).
To ensure that we achieve our Sustainability Goal as regards female representation within the firm, we set up dedicated working group called “Female Acceleration”, that is presenting their ideas, roadmap and progress at the regular “Sustainable by Design” SteerCo.

Also, we are continuously revising / updating our DIVE policy to ensure high standards and accounting for the accelerating demands externally and dynamics internally.
Our various legal entities have created 15 workers council representations.

We take responsibility for the ecological effects that our business come with. This especially means avoiding or reducing environmental and ecological footprint where possible. For emission effects that we cannot avoid in our business transformation, we see it as mandatory to offset our footprint on the way.
Following a materiality analysis, we found that our biggest pain point is our footprint related to travel. For the matter of transparency, we still need to be clear on our overall emission footprint to derive a clear ambition and according reduction roadmap. Beyond data transparency, we see it as our responsibility to enable our people to make wise travel decisions. This comes with a combination of directives, clear communication and awareness. The basis of this is given within our Code of Business Ethics, where we commit ourselves to protecting the environment. We also have a CSR Policy in place, which we revised due to changes in the governance model and due to the accelerating priority of the CSR topic overall
Also, as regards up- and downstream relations, we aim to tackle sustainability aspects to:
- Regarding our suppliers, we expect them to also be able to show their authentic endeavours to improve their environmental footprint. It is our goal to only work with suppliers that can document these endeavours by policies and action.
- Also, we see that we as a consulting firm can create even more impact, by helping our clients with their sustainable transformation.

Our Goal…
It is our goal to define a governance structure that enables us to keep track of our actions to tackle our environmental challenges, predominantly travel-related, to connect the dots and ensure ongoing reporting, improvement, and compensation for the remaining emissions. We have formulated an emission reduction ambition lately, claiming for us to reduce our firmwide CO²e emissions by 50% as compared to 2019 by end of 2025 for the SBTi 1.5° path.
Also, other environmental challenges will be tackled across the firm (IT waste, plastic waste) shall be reduced.

BearingPoint is a Management and Technology Consulting Firm. We understand it as our responsibility to encourage sustainable innovation not only within our firm, but also with our clients, covering the ideas of both economic and ecological sustainability.

Our Goal…
It is our goal to further promote existing offerings in the fields of Sustainability Client Offerings, covering topics such as Green IT, Sustainable Finance and Sustainable Supply Chain Management. We want to launch an internal Community of Practice for our Sustainability Offerings.
We also want to use our innovation potential in the form of in-kind engagement. For example, we want to further engage with skill-based donations and develop a pro bono programme, where we help non-profit organisations and social start-ups with impactful answers to the big global challenges / sustainable development goals via strategy and digital consultancy. The idea is to help them make their work even more successful.

BearingPoint has made CSR a priority in 2019 and beyond. Consequently, BearingPoint has created a function addressing CSR on a firm-wide level. The responsibility of this role is to span a strategic umbrella around the regional CSR activities, to coordinate activities and to enable ongoing exchange between practices and across regions, levels, and functions. The role is leading the CSR Council (a group of regional / local CSR leads). A firm-wide CSR Sponsor from the Partner level supports this role.
Some topics within the defined fields of engagement at BearingPoint deserve specific focus and responsibility (Diversity and Inclusion Council, network of sustainability agents promoting sustainable thinking, innovation and decision-making across the firm, individual offices as well as amongst our People and CSR leads.Lately, we
We have formulated the emission ambition on firmwide level together with an implemented “Sustainable by Design”-Steering Committee. This committee consists of firmwide leaders in key functions, including our Managing Partner, the Managing Committee Sponsor for CSR (including Diversity), partner sponsors that lead dedicated priority teams which tackle our Sustainability Goals (including the emission ambition).
Also, a firmwide travel policy will ensure that the avoidance of CO2 emissions is a clear goal and that incentives are set up to encourage this.
As regards Sustainability Consulting, we connect the dots on across the firm, levels, and segments with a strong community with more than 350 people involved.
Suppliers are demanded to accept and act in compliance with our Supplier Code of Business Ethics. We connected the dots between the different expertise in internal teams that tackle sustainability challenges for our clients.
We encourage our people to come up with ideas regularly. Although we have not set up a specific green challenge yet, many ideas received already cover ideas to a green normal and are being worked on further.

We have set up a holistic emission dashboard to define the baseline year (2019) emissions, create emission transparency and track progress.
We enriched our perspective on emissions. While the travel footprint makes for the highest emission impact, we have collected data for commute, IT and offices.
This dashboard is built based on the calculations provided by the BearingPoint Emissions Calculator.
In 2021, we issue a dedicated Sustainability Report with detailed data and transparency on data sources, assumptions made and reference to our baseline year 2019.
Doing so, we can show how we as a firm follow-up on our concrete emission target that we formulated for end of 2025 based on the SBTi analytic approach.
Next to a goal and a data foundation, there must be actions defined to make the reduction path happened as needed. Too do so, a dedicated priority team called “E.Mission Zero” is leading the workstream by developing the roadmap, prepare decisions with leadership teams and consulting practices and teams.
Meanwhile, we will be compensating the firm’s emissions with our partner Forliance.
In addition, another priority team called “Sustainable Ways of Working” is designing approaches to ensure that our daily doing is promoting the defined sustainability goals. Especially, we have formulated the goal to deliver all our projects sustainably by end of 2025. To raise awareness for and support our people with sustainable action, we encourage action, by sharing Sustainability Hacks on Sustainably Working from Home and Sustainable Business Trips. Also, we have developed the App “GreenWays” which is empowering our people to track their travel emissions in their private lives.
We promoted the topic Sustainability Solutions within our leadership and gained much additional consulting expertise from strategy to tool implementation. Additionally, we have set up specific homepages about our sustainability tools and offerings, for example the Emissions Calculator homepage to give the tool additional visibility.
We have a team working on a new App to allow for individual CO2 compensation, which we will make available for free after some testing within our BearingPoint community.We started a participative and publicly documented conceptualization of our BearingPoint Pro Bono Toolbox together with non-profit organisations and the Platform D3 (“So geht Digital”), which is funded by the Federal Ministry of the Interior. We have had 3 Pro Bono consulting projects and 4 workshops in 2020. With COVID-19, our original plans to bring Pro Bono to life at BearingPoint were challenged.

BearingPoint's reputation for integrity goes back over one hundred years and is one of our most important assets. We are proud that BearingPoint has consistently maintained a strong focus on integrity throughout its history and we are committed to ensuring that it continues to do so. To support this our Code of Business Ethics prohibits our people and third parties acting on our behalf from offering, promising, authorizing, making or receiving from clients, suppliers, public officials or any other business relations or partners, either directly or through a third party, any inappropriate monetary or other benefit or undue advantage and in this respect must always comply with applicable laws and regulations.

In addition, specific guidelines on gifts and entertainment have been specified. Since we operate in countries with different cultural and business ethics in relation to financial improprieties, we set up specific compliance approval and due diligence requirements for our business partners in specific higher risk countries and areas of operation.

In 2020 and 2021 we introduced new processes to avoid potential conflict of interests.

Our Goal

We aim to increase the level of awareness with respect to this topic, strengthen our procedures to ensure that no conflict of interest arises between our employees and business partners and also initiate the first steps of monitoring the robustness of the implementation of our policies and procedures.

BearingPoint applies various approaches to ensure our people are adequately and correctly trained for the functions they perform and are aware of the critical legislation affecting our business.

Mandatory E-learning modules have been designed to address compliance-related topics, such as the principles of Code of Business Ethics, including anti-bribery and corruption rules and continues to be mandatory for all new hires. Awareness material is also being made available on our intranet.
BearingPoint has introduced a confidential TrustLine, specifically encouraging our people to report concerns over non-compliant conduct, including any alleged corrupt practices.

TrustLine is an anonymous and confidential online reporting system developed by Business Keeper AG: The Business Keeper Monitoring System. Only selected members of the Group Compliance team have access to the information and are overseeing any potential investigation in cooperation with the relevant subject matter experts.

Specifically, around Conflict of Interest we introduced new processes which include annual confirmation from our Partners and senior managers.
In addition, we introduced automated control and data analytics continuing monitoring processes, specifically in the area of expense control with third parties .

We established new dashboard reporting and continue to discuss the

the level of implementation of the program monthly with the Managing Partner, the Chief Operating Officer and the Chairman of the Partnership Board. In addition the Chief Compliance Officer provides regular updates to the Partnership Board and Supervisory boards.

Specific focus is being placed on the monthly measurement of the level of awareness, given by the completion status of the various e-learnings, which have been made available to selected third parties.