Tariq Fancy

Tariq Fancy is a successful investor, turnaround specialist, and entrepreneur, and has a unique perspective and voice on a critical challenge for global capitalism today: how to merge sustainability and social imperatives with traditional business models focused purely on profit.

Tariq previously served as BlackRock’s first-ever Global Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing. After leaving the firm he began publishing op-eds challenging the ESG status quo, culminating in a 2021 viral essay entitled “The Secret Diary of a Sustainable Investor” that argued that business leaders are “answering inconvenient truths with convenient fantasies.” The essay was widely covered in the press and sparked a wide-ranging and ongoing backlash against ‘greenwashing’ in the financial services industry.

Tariq found himself at the nexus of capitalism’s attempt to merge profit and purpose after a genuine foray across both extremes. On the ‘purpose’ side, from 2013 to 2017 he founded and built Rumie, an award winning digital non-profit that pioneered smartphone-based ‘microlearning’ that is used today by millions in over 150 countries – including by Afghan girls to learn safely from anywhere on a mobile phone. Rumie, which Tariq founded following the passing of a close friend from business school in late 2012, is a graduate of tech incubator Y-Combinator and subject of a 2016 Harvard Business School case study.

Prior to his time in the non-profit world, Tariq spent a long career on the ‘profit’ side as a senior investment professional. He began his career in 2001 in Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB)’s technology investment banking group in Palo Alto, which led the IPOs of Google, Amazon, and Cisco. In 2003, he joined MHR Fund Management, a New York-based private equity firm with a focus on distressed, turnaround and special situations investing, where he became the firm’s youngest partner in 2006. From 2010 to 2012, he served as senior investment professional at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), where he led the creation and investment of various new global investment strategies. In 2012 and 2013, he led the turnaround of Wildfire, an Asian software company that was acquired in 2015. 

Tariq’s writings and lectures are informed by practical, hands-on experience turning around businesses from Shanghai to San Diego, building and executing on profitable new investment verticals, building consensus and implementing changes across large bureaucracies, and using new data and technological methods to carefully measure and supercharge social impact. He has developed a reputation as a rare contrarian in the ESG space, one who challenges us all to step outside of our short-term incentives and targets in order to find long-term solutions that actually work on the timelines required. Tariq has written guest pieces for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, USA Today, The Globe and Mail, and Le Monde, among others.

Tariq completed his undergraduate studies at Brown University, during which he spent his junior year abroad studying PPE in the UK at Oxford University, and holds a Masters in Economics & Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris and an MBA from INSEAD in France and Singapore. He was born and raised in Toronto and has lived and worked across North America, Europe, and Asia, and speaks four languages.