In the 1990s, amidst the tumult of the Asian financial crisis, Vincent Shen discerned a beacon of opportunity. Abandoning a modestly salaried role at Citi Bank, he embarked on an audacious journey with Merrill Lynch's experimental "Young Bankers for Local Affluent Markets" program, which offered only commissions, not salaries. Driven by a vision and the necessity to support his young family, Vincent embraced this high-stakes challenge.
Starting with the management of a mere USD 250,000 account in Taiwan, Vincent's assets under management soared to an astounding USD 4 billion within a few short years. His remarkable success led to his promotion to the regional headquarters in Singapore and subsequently to Hong Kong. This achievement was no accident; it was the product of a meticulously crafted strategy centered on total integration—melding systems thinking theory with altruism to create win-win solutions. This innovative approach facilitated deals amounting to trillions of dollars in mergers and acquisitions, private equity, IPOs, and asset management from the greater China market to global marketplaces. Vincent's extraordinary accomplishments earned him the distinction of being the youngest and highest-paid Managing Director in the region, etching his name into Wall Street's "Circle of Champions," the highest accolade for top bankers worldwide.
After a decade of trailblazing success at Merrill Lynch, he ascended to the ranks of the world's top three bankers. Renowned as a strategic venture capitalist and a pioneer in banking innovation, Vincent initiated the Private Investment Banking Group—a revolutionary platform fostering collaboration across banking units, creating positive feedback loops that benefited all parties involved. His achievements attracted the attention of Rockefeller and Co. CEO James McDonald, who personally travelled to Taipei to propose a joint venture. Concurrently, Vincent received a personal invitation from Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, ultimately deciding to follow his former boss from Merrill Lynch to Morgan Stanley.
In his late 30s, with a fervent desire to transform Taiwan's healthcare system, Vincent planned an early retirement and returned to his hometown. Leveraging his prowess in capital markets, global influence, and extensive industrial network, he established Taiwan's largest oncology enterprise through a series of strategic mergers and acquisitions. This visionary move resulted in a company valued in the billions in two years, providing millions with improved early diagnosis and treatment options, and sparking widespread healthcare system reforms across Taiwan. This impact investment achieved a 20x return on investment and record-breaking IPO oversubscription.
Vincent's quest for systemic impact did not end there. He returned to Oxford University's Saïd Business School to further his education and spent the next 12 years traveling the world, connecting the dots among academia, NGOs, banks, and impact investors. Through angel investing and blended financing projects, he achieved a remarkable 24.6% IRR in impact
investments, even during the turbulence of the pandemic.Amidst the post-COVID recession, Vincent, as chair of Harvard University's Cognitive Art Multimedia Lab (CAMLab) advisory board, introduced cutting-edge immersive theatre technology integrated with 5G to a local social enterprise to revitalize Taipei's oldest town. Transforming it into a vibrant cultural economy zone, this project received backing from Taiwan's central government and sovereign wealth fund, invigorated local businesses, created thousands of jobs, and attracted investment from globally influential families.
Today, Vincent leads the Systems Impact Multi-Family Office, SIMFO, and chairs the SZU CHI Angel Private Equity Fund, continuing his legacy as a systems thinker and market maker, tackling the root causes of environmental challenges in collaboration with Oxford, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia University, along with global impact families such as Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates partnering with the Environmental Defense Fund, EDF.
Vincent’s family has long been devoted to the Tzu Chi Foundation, the largest philanthropic organization in the Chinese-speaking world, active in over 136 countries. As Tzu Chi’s honorable board director, Vincent has been a generous donor to various charitable and academic institutions, driving forward innovation and compassion. Vincent Shen's story is not merely one of remarkable financial success, but of visionary leadership, relentless innovation, and profound social impact—a testament to the transformative power of integrating strategy with altruism.
Tanvir Ghani is the President and co-founder of Tybourne Capital Management, a multi billion dollar investment management (hedge and private equity) firm based out of Hong Kong. Prior to that Tanvir was a Managing Director at Goldman Sachs specializing in alternative assets. He graduated from SIPA in 2001 concentrating in Finance and Business. He lives between London and Hong Kong. Tanvir spends a quality amount of time private equity investing in his home country of Bangladesh.
Steve Lydenberg is Partner, Strategic Vision for Domini Impact Investments LLC, Founder and Chairman of The Investment Integration Project (TIIP), and Founding Director of the Initiative for Responsible Investment. For over four decades he has been active in responsible investment with the Council on Economic Priorities, Trillium Asset Management and KLD Research & Analytics. He is author of numerous articles on responsible investment including, “Reason, Rationality and Fiduciary Duty” and “On Materiality and Sustainability: The Value of Disclosure in the Capital Markets”. He is also author of several books on responsible investment including 21 st Century Investing: Redirecting Financial Strategies to Drive Systems Change (Berrett-Koehler, co-author William Burckart); Corporations and the Public Interest (Berrett-Koehler) and Dilemmas in Responsible Investment (Greenleaf, co-author Céline Louche). He holds a BA from Columbia College and an MFA in Theater from Cornell University and CFA Charter designation.
Bob Massie has been one of the most respected leaders in the field of sustainability and finance for nearly forty years. A student anti-apartheid activist at Princeton in the 1970s, Massie obtained a master’s degree in social and theological ethics from Yale Divinity School in 1982 and a doctorate in corporate strategy from Harvard Business School in 1989. His dissertation focused on how institutional investors integrated moral and political concerns into their investment policies. In 1993 he served as a Senior Fulbright Scholar on the faculty of the University of Cape Town. In 1998 he published Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, which won the 1998 Lionel Gelber prize for the best book in the world on international relations. In 1996 Massie became the first president of Ceres and helped to build it into the powerful coalition of investors, corporations, and sustainability organizations it is today. In 1998, believing that key capital market actors needed high quality, comparable sustainability data, he co-founded and chaired the Global Reporting Initiative. In 2002, he created and led the first Institutional Investor Summit on Climate Risk at United Nations headquarters in New York. That same year he was picked by CFO magazine as one of the 100 most influential leaders in finance. He also served for three years on the original International Integrated Reporting Commission (IIRC) chaired by Justice Mervyn King of South Africa. Massie has also had a prominent role in the politics of his home state of Massachusetts, having served as the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 1994 and as a candidate for governor in 2018. In recent years he has continued to work on mandatory sustainability reporting, the evolution of corporate governance, and the need for fundamental reform in the fields of accounting, finance, and economics. In the summer of 2023, he convened the Materiality Working Group, a monthly discussion group and clearinghouse of US and UK thought leaders who are focusing on charting the evolution of the intersection of sustainability and finance.
Osvald Bjelland is a Norwegian entrepreneur and investor, whose long record of founding organizations that espouse ecologically and civically responsible mandates. Bjelland currently serves as chairman of Origination LTD, a London -based company he founded that mobilizes originators and other exceptional leaders worldwide to invest in service of people and the planet with long-term strategic foresight.
In 2000, after selling The Performance Group in the wake of the dot-com bubble, he traded commerce for academia, earning a PhD from the University of Leeds (UK) in 2008. Later, he would return to academia as a visiting business fellow at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and as a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Several purpose-driven ventures followed, notably the 2001 launch of his advisory firm Xynteo, dedicated to among others guiding energy transition in frontier markets such as India. He served as CEO, president and chairman. In 2023, Bjelland sold a majority share of Xynteo to Leon Capital and retained a 20 percent stake along with an employee ownership arrangement. Bjelland's legacy is also stamped on partnerships and business consortiums such as the Tata Xynteo Exchange, a joint venture helmed by Bjelland and the chairman of Tata Sons. Other partneships include Vikaasa and Europe Delivers. Under Bjelland’s stewardship, Xynteo also built The Leadership Vanguard, working with global CEOs, heads of state, Nobel laureates and scientists to promote “good growth” in service of people and the planet. Together, the companies and collaborative entities have delivered over five hundred projects in the U.S., China, India, Europe, and Brazil.
Bjelland is married to Thorhild Widvey, Norway’s former Minister of Petroleum and Energy as well as Minister of Culture. The couple has two sons. He remains an enthusiastic farmer, adhering to a zero-pesticide environment.
His motto brings together the essence of his work – stronger together!
Mike is global co-head and co-chief investment officer of the External Investing Group (XIG) within Asset and Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs. XIG invests in leading private equity, hedge fund, real estate, credit, public market and ESG managers as a limited partner, secondary-market investor, co-investor or management company partner. Mike also serves on the group's investment committees across private equity, real estate, hedge fund and impact investment strategies. Mike earned a BA in International Affairs from the University of California, Davis, an MBA from Columbia Business School and an MIA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is a CFA charter holder.
Forbes calls long-time institutional investor Jon Lukomnik one of the pioneers of modern corporate governance. The managing partner of Sinclair Capital LLC, a strategic consultancy to institutional investors, Jon has been the investment advisor or a trustee for more than $100 billion (including New York City’s pension funds) and has consulted to institutional investors with aggregate assets of $1 trillion dollars. He served for more than a decade as the executive director of the IRRC Institute and is a former Pembroke Visiting Professor at the Judge Business School at Cambridge. Jon is a member of the Deloitte Audit Quality Advisory Committee, a trustee for the Van Eck mutual funds and serves on the Standards and Emerging Issues Advisory Group of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the Board of The Shareholder Commons and the Advisory Board of The Investment Integration Project. Jon co-founded the International Corporate Governance Network (ICGN) and Governance Metrics International (now part of MSCI). He is a Senior Fellow for the High Meadows Institute. Jon’s most recent book, “Moving Beyond Modern Portfolio Theory: Investing That Matters” is co-authored with Professor Jim Hawley. Their work focuses on MPT’s inability to deal with systematic risk, and how investors can and do mitigate risks such as climate change, income inequality, lack of diversity, and anti-microbial resistance as a way to increase return and/or reduce risk. Jon is also the co-author of two other books about the capital markets, and more than 200 academic and practitioner papers.
The Managing Director of the Sustainable Investing Research Initiative is Chandana Yelkur. She is an alumna of SIPA’s Master of Public Affairs program in Environmental Science and Policy. Chandana has deep expertise in sustainable investing and reporting. Besides serving as SIRI’s Managing Director, she is also a Research Associate at SIRI and conducts research on systems-aligned metrics.
The Founding Director of the research initiative is Caroline Flammer, Professor of International and Public Affairs and of Climate. She is an expert in sustainable investing and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards. Among other roles, she is the President of the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability, a global multi-disciplinary network of scholars fostering rigorous academic research on corporate sustainability. Professor Flammer also serves as the Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), the largest network of responsible investors to date.
Staff Directory
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