The Bank has £22bn of financial capacity, of which £8bn is available by way of equity and debt, and £10bn by way of guarantees. Each of these products forms a key part of our offering to infrastructure projects, and can enable us to:
- crowd in private sector investment
- reduce barriers to investment
- aid the scaling of proven technologies
- increase market capacity
- address liquidity issues
We will consider offering these products on a case-by-case basis, supporting proposals that fall within the scope of our mandate and investment principles. If you have a project you’d like to discuss with us, get in touch.
Equity
We offer equity investment into qualifying infrastructure projects including ordinary equity, preferred equity and convertible loan notes. As well as considering mature assets which require equity investment to further their impact, the Bank targets equity investments in earlier-stage infrastructure projects and technologies looking to scale up. These would typically have a Technology Readiness Level of 7 or above.
Debt
We offer debt across the capital structure, and can work to develop tailored solutions for each transaction. Our debt offering can be provided on a fixed or floating rate basis and includes senior debt, mezzanine debt and bridge financing.
Mezzanine debt in particular can be used to help crowd-in debt capacity by reducing the risk of a project from the perspective of senior funders, potentially also raising the project's overall debt capacity. This can be achieved by, for example, providing funded or contingent mezzanine to cover construction cost overruns, respond to temporary revenue shortfalls, or to wrap and thus mitigate specific technical or commercial risks.
Guarantees
We offer guarantees to qualifying infrastructure projects backed by the Sovereign Infrastructure Guarantee, an agreement between the Bank and HM Treasury that will allow us to issue sovereign-equivalent guarantees to qualifying projects. This sovereign equivalence has been confirmed by Moody’s in their sector comment.
Our products include:
- financial guarantees: providing credit substitution for an underlying debt instrument
- credit enhancement guarantees: unfunded guarantees designed to enhance the credit quality or credit rating of other project debt
- first loss guarantees: guarantees for a capped amount of potential losses on a portfolio of smaller debt obligations
We can consider alternative forms of guarantee on a case by case basis, beyond the core offering.
UKIB guarantee documentation
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