Standards are set on paper.
They are earned in practice.
Mandating them and disclosing them are not the same as meeting them. A published framework and a governed institution are different things.
Phaida Ventures is an independent advisory firm working at the intersection of corporate governance, sustainable investing, and long term value creation, and a contribution to responsible AI. That gap between the framework and the institution took companies and markets decades to close. AI has less time.
Advisory work spans sustainable investing, value creation, and the corporate finance decisions underneath both: raising capital, transactions, and the integration that follows them. Alongside this, the firm follows and contributes to the international AI governance conversation. Behind both: a career in banking, brokerage, and asset management, all heavily regulated, spent putting global standards into practice in emerging markets where standards have to be earned rather than assumed.
Phaida takes its name from the Turkish word fayda: to be of benefit, of use, of value to others. It is a plain test, and a demanding one.
2018
Founded on Estonia’s e-Residency platform, inside the EU digital framework, to bring governance and capital markets depth to technology ventures growing globally
Five regions
Collaborations with NGOs, technology companies, incubators, accelerators, and projects across Türkiye, Europe, the UK, South America, and the USA
35 years
Capital markets, banking, and asset management, seen from the executive, board, and investor sides of the table, and from the committees that helped shape the rules
Geneva 2026
Accredited private sector participant, UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance
I am not a technologist. I am a governance practitioner: I have spent my career asking one question from inside boardrooms and audit committees. Who is responsible, and to whom?
The technology moves faster than any regulator can follow in detail, so the answer cannot be perfect regulation. It starts with agreeing the minimum basics, not nation by nation but as globally accepted benchmarks: enough to build real accountability and oversight for the risks, even if not enough on its own. That is what builds trust, especially for the stakeholders with the least power to demand it, the Global South and emerging economies. And the minimum has to keep rising, or it stops being a minimum.
The same governance question looks different from each side of the table. This is a view from most of them.
Who is accountable, to whom, and through what mechanism?
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Investor side
Led institutional investment management companies under UK and EU regulated ownership. Chair of the fund boards and investment committees.
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Investee side
Chief executive at financial institutions. On the receiving side of auditors, rating agencies and validators, which is a different experience from commissioning them.
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Board side
Independent non executive director, and chair of audit, corporate governance and risk committees at listed companies.
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Public and multilateral
Named member of two national Development Plan commissions. Accredited private sector stakeholder at the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance.
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Self regulatory side
Board member and vice chair at Türkiye’s two capital markets industry bodies, responsible for regulatory work at both.
And on whose behalf
Governance spent a century answering that for shareholders and creditors. The list is longer now.
- Shareholders and lenders
- The people who work there
- Customers and counterparties
- Suppliers and partners
- Regulators and supervisors
- The communities a business operates in
- The environment it draws on
- The generations who inherit what it builds
Artificial intelligence adds one more: everyone a system makes a decision about, whether or not they ever agreed to it.
AI raises the same question in a new domain.
Three interconnected areas of practice. One commitment to governance.
01
Board & Governance
Board mandates at listed and private companies, and the widening scope of oversight that now sits with them: AI, cybersecurity, and regulatory complexity across jurisdictions, alongside the financial fundamentals.
02
Growth & Development
Growth that the organisation can actually carry. Guidance for investors, lenders, and companies on ESG integration, inorganic growth and what follows a transaction, and readiness for what expansion asks of a business.
03
Impact & Strategy
Where Phaida began, in 2018. Impact strategy, investor readiness, ecosystem building, and the intermediary work that connects the right counterparties across markets.
Listed and privately owned companies navigating inorganic growth, succession, international expansion, or a funding strategy that has to satisfy outside capital.
International financial institutions needing governance due diligence on an investee, or board effectiveness work with a portfolio company.
NGOs and multilateral bodies building governance and impact frameworks that have to hold up to private sector scrutiny.
Universities and research institutes building out corporate governance, AI, and sustainable finance programmes.
Governance questions rarely sit in one discipline, and the institutions worth working with are rarely looking for a single perspective.
What Phaida brings to a shared table is the governance and capital markets half of the problem.
Not a practice area. An area of collaboration and contribution.
AI oversight inside a company is advisory work, and it sits within Board & Governance, above.
The wider question, how AI is governed across institutions, markets, and borders, is something else. It is open, it is moving faster than regulation can follow in detail, and it is shaped mostly by technologists and policymakers.
A pattern runs through the work: connecting emerging markets, companies, and organisations to international partners, capital, and standards.
It is the same skill exercised across a career working with international best practice. From taking part in a UN backed impact accelerator, to decentralised technology projects.
