Tariq Fancy has served as a successful investor, hands-on turnaround specialist, and entrepreneur who has lived and worked across North America, Europe, and Asia.

In 2018 and 2019, Tariq served as BlackRock’s first-ever Global Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing. After leaving 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 called ‘riveting’ by the Economist and sparked a growing backlash against widespread ESG industry practices that constitute greenwashing with little to no real-world impact.

From 2013-2017 he founded and built Rumie, an award-winning digital non-profit that pioneered smartphone-based ‘microlearning’ that is used today by millions in over 200 countries – including by Afghan girls to learn safely from anywhere on a mobile phone.

Tariq spent a long career on the ‘profit’ side as a senior investment professional. A self-taught programmer who received full-time coding offers upon graduation, he began his career in 2001 in Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB)’s technology investment banking group, which led the IPOs of Google, Amazon, and Cisco. In 2003, he joined MHR Fund Management, a 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.

He is especially popular as a voice amongst those who believe that we need a hard-nosed, practical and honest conversation about where business is today and where it needs to go, and want to get from the optical changes and PR initiatives of the last few years (talking the talk) to the real-life results (walking the walk).