About Cyan Reef
Cyan Reef is an initiative to promote awareness, create better governance, and open access to sustainable and impact-oriented finance. The project was started on the back of two decades of the original and applied research for better and more equitable finance by a team of scholars with expertise in building market infrastructure solutions.
The mission of Cyan Reef is to facilitate financial services aligned with investors’ values and environment, social, and governance standards through efficient, transparent, and accountable financial solutions.
Story
Finance and technology research can provide solutions to important problems in finance, but frequently, the potential of new research advances remain under-utilized.
Cyan Reef was created by finance and technology scientists as a platform to transfer research and know-how into pragmatic solutions. Our team leads core research agendas in finance which address a number of critical problems in the financial industry and which severely affect fair and equitable functioning of the markets. Specifically, in the context of impact and ESG integration, there is an acute need for better alignment of interests, greater accountability, and higher material impact. In the asset management industry, a long chain of intermediation creates multitude of conflicts of interests, resulting in moral hazard and agency problems, ultimately paid-for by a large number of the most vulnerable small investors who are supposed to be the principals and the key decision-makers in the investment value chain. Ineffective governance mechanism is one of the key problems that Cyan Reef seeks to address.
Technological innovations in finance present a unique opportunity to solve many of such long-standing challenges. We can now replace outdated and entrenched market mechanisms with better and more efficient financial products based on the principles of aligned governance, greater shared benefits, and accountable capital allocation.
Our solutions are applied across financial value chains in banking, asset management, and market design, with the goal of maximizing value through impact-oriented finance. Some examples of our prior research impact in practice include new financing in emerging markets, new asset classes in private equity, better financing for small companies, or financing infrastructure for renewable energy.
Team
Vlado Kysucky, Ph.D.
Prof. Joseph Cheung, Ph.D.
Mijat Kustudic, Ph.D.
Prof. Ben Chan
Adam Williams
Marian Tarnavskyi
Peijie PJ Huang
Zachary Taixing Zhang
