When founder Taimour Zaman of AltFunds Global launched the advisory firm, he wasn’t looking to tweak existing financial systems, he was aiming to transform them. Working with sovereign institutions across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, his mission was clear: unlock capital faster, smarter, and with less reliance on traditional debt.
Founder of AltFunds Global, Taimour Zaman.
“I started AltFunds Global because I saw a challenge with traditional sources of capital – banks, private equity, etc,” he says. “They were sitting on valuable assets, land, carbon credits, infrastructure revenue but couldn’t access liquidity fast enough to make meaningful change. Traditional capital models are too slow, too risk-averse, and in many cases, too rigid to adapt to the pace of today’s geopolitical, climate, and technological disruptions.”
From that diagnosis came a thesis: sovereign financing needs a new toolkit. And increasingly, sovereigns are listening.
He adds: “Across regions, I’ve noticed a common pattern: the desire for debt-light capital models. In the Middle East, sovereigns are turning to carbon-backed instruments to meet both climate and commercial goals. In Asia, especially Singapore and South Korea, there’s growing experimentation with tokenised cash flows and digital sovereign bonds. And in Europe, the appetite is growing for structured liquidity tools that can bridge political timelines with infrastructure urgency.”
Across the Middle East, sovereign wealth funds and government entities are leaning into carbon-backed instruments that align with climate commitments without triggering public debt ceilings.
Zaman points out, “UAE and Saudi Arabia have launched sovereign climate funds and development banks that don’t wait on multilateral coordination, they move.”
In Asia, countries like Singapore and South Korea are at the forefront of digital asset innovation, exploring tokenised sovereign bonds, programmable finance, and blockchain-backed infrastructure funding.
“From Asia, particularly Singapore, the lesson is on governance-led innovation. Singapore has clear digital asset rules, tokenisation pilots, and programmable finance experiments underway, all with government backing.,” he says.
Europe, by contrast, is playing catch-up, still reliant on rigid financial systems shaped by centralised bureaucracy and cautious regulatory frameworks.
Describing Europe’s sovereign capital ecosystem as “slow, restrictive, and politically encumbered,” the founder points to three key structural barriers:
Overregulation: Basel IV constraints make banks overly conservative, even when sovereign guarantees are involved.
Fragmented governance: Each EU member state has its own politics and rules, making cross-border capital projects painfully slow.
Procurement complexity: Many sovereign infrastructure projects are delayed not because of funding gaps, but because of procurement bureaucracy.