Export Finance Exit Opps

Hi, just curious to know what type of exit opps can one do if they worked in export finance ie dealing with ECA's in terms of both banking and non-banking jobs? Is there much modelling involved etc?

8 Comments
 

Don't work in export finance but have some experience dealing with them. Depends on the group/bank. If it is on the structured export side then there can be a good amount of modelling and it is essentially similar to project finance. Once you move closer to trade finance, there isn't really much modelling at all.

As far as exit opportunities, I think people end up either leveraging their relationship/knowledge of the agency//multilateral to continue in an advisory/arranging capacity, work directly at an agency/multilateral or related fields (such as credit insurance). Alternatively, going to work for clients could be an option - telecom, aircraft companies would have departments that specifically deal with export finance. For trade finance, commodity traders would also be an option.

 

If you advise on arranging large export-credit led project, you may have to model the underlying asset. Focus here is CF/debt modelling. I would say it really depends on what kind of of bank/group it is. The big European banks with strong export finance groups will have them under structured finance and often have industry coverage residing within debt product for example. Within Citi/DB on the other hand such group sits under transaction banking so I would say you're more pigeonholed there but do not have a first hand experience.

 
Best Response

Export finance is typically quite a plain vanilla product.

Essentially you're working on structuring a loan which will benefit from a AAA or AA sovereign guarantee via an Export Agency (e.g. US EXIM, HERMES, UKEF, each OCDE country has one promoting exports) so your risk is hugely mitigated and as such the credit analysis and modelling can either be very limited or non-existent.

Exception to that are the project finance deals where there may be a tranche benefiting from such Export Agency and that agency will need to get comfortable from the underlying project first.

A lot of project finance strong banks (e.g. the French and the Japanese) will have their PF team look at it, involving all the credit work and modelling you want, but others (e.g. HSBC, Citi) will have a separate team and there the work will be quite far from what you see in IB. Essentially coordination and legal negotiation

 

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