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Digital Financing and Business Models for Smart Infrastructure Assets

What is Smart Infrastructure Finance?

Professor Peter Adriaens explains how financial innovations based on digital twins of infrastructure can be used to fund and finance resilient future-ready projects.

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Resilient Infrastructure | Financial Innovation | Standards and Benchmarks

Efficient Financing for Intelligent Infrastructure

The Center for Digital Asset Finance (CDAF) at the University of Michigan (U-M) integrates digital twins of smart infrastructure with financial innovations such as fintech to solve financing problems for critical societal infrastructure services such as energy, water, transportation and housing, along with digital infrastructures such as networks and communications services.

CDAF specifically focuses on integrating Internet of Things (IoT) enabled data-streams from water, transportation, housing, energy and waste systems with financial models.

We seek to address investment barriers such as cost of financing, market adoption and cost performance uncertainties.

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Megatrends Drive Motivation

Digital delivery of infrastructure assets and services

Infrastructure Redefined

Automation and digitalization have expanded infrastructure value chains to include information architecture that serves to operate, maintain, and create value-added services for resilience of the underlying intelligent asset.

Digital Business Models

The integration of IoT in the design, construction and operation of smart infrastructure systems, is resulting in new data-driven business and revenue models, including transformation of CAPEX to SaaS-like OPEX. projects.

Financial Innovation

Smart infrastructure can be financed beyond traditional debt and equity investments to include IoT-informed bonds, risk transfer models, data securitization, and tokenization of ESG and performance data.

Exploring how financial technologies enable next generation affordable infrastructure delivery

Master of Engineering in Smart Infrastructure Finance

In 2023, the Master of Engineering (MEng) degree in Smart Infrastructure Finance will be a highly immersive academic experience that is open to students from different academic backgrounds. The program not only provides a curriculum oriented towards data-driven finance and business models, but also offers students invaluable professional experience in the financial services, data management, and smart infrastructure industries.