Mark Hayes, who has died of cancer aged 63, founded Shared Interest, a UK cooperative that provides financial services to fair trade producers worldwide. Established in 1990, today it has more than 11,500 investors investing £41m, and in the last year invested £62m in 363 organisations in 63 countries.

Born to Irish parents, Angela (nee McGrath) and Tom Hayes, in Toronto, where his father, a chartered engineer, was then working, Mark was educated at Stonyhurst college in Lancashire. I met him at Cambridge, where he read economics at Clare College and laid the foundation for his guiding thought, which was to create new models for trading. From Cambridge, he joined 3i, Europe’s largest venture capital organisation, and was running the Melbourne office before he was 30.

Mark had no interest in personal wealth and chose to live simply. In 1986 he contacted the fair trade organisation Traidcraft with a radical proposal to address the gap in producer finance in the developing world. His idea was to alleviate poverty by providing loans and credit facilities to help disadvantaged communities to trade. After five months, investments totalled £350,000, supporting 13 new projects.

Two years later, Shared Interest achieved £1m of share capital and by 1996 the figure was £10m, with the organisation winning multiple business awards.

In 1998 he handed over the directorship in order to pursue a second career as an economics academic. He wanted to write about what he had put into practice and continue to explore radical models. He began a PhD at the University of Sunderland, riding a classic Honda VFR750 motorbike in his spare time. At school, he had built a motorbike from scratch in the metal workshop, using it to escape to Wigan to meet girls. He now took his wife, Andrea (nee O’Sullivan, whom he had married in 1984), and each of his children on the back of this second bike to destinations such as Paris, Florence and Rome.

After his PhD, he became a visiting fellow at the University of Northumbria, where he wrote his first book. In 2006 he became a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, and, from 2009, director of studies in economics. In 2014, he moved to Durham University to the St Hilda chair in Catholic social thought and practice. At home in Newcastle, he and Andrea continued with community projects.

Ten days before his death, Mark lectured in Cambridge and launched another book, John Maynard Keynes: The Art of Choosing the Right Model, a study of Keynes for those without economic training.

Mark is survived by Andrea, their four children, Tom, Lucy, Rosie and Leo, his parents and his sister, Anne. Another sister, Miriam, predeceased him.