It’s not often that a banker invites you, mid interview, to review documents behind a big real estate financing deal his institution has worked on. And Andrew Bester, member of the management board banking and head of wholesale banking at ING, is offering a sight into what just might be the biggest real estate deal in history.
ING is a distinguished brand in retail banking. Bester has been talking Euromoney through progress since his recruitment in 2021 by the Dutch bank’s then still new chief executive Steven van Rijswijk to power up the wholesale banking side.
Bester has spent much of his first couple of years fixing the basics and setting the platform up to do more in transaction services and also to build on its expertise in advising companies on sustainable finance to win more equity and debt capital markets and M&A advisory work.
Bester, who describes himself as a South African Brit, comes with an impressive history. His career took off in the early 1990s at Standard Chartered, where he worked in derivatives structuring and sales. He went on to co-head wholesale banking in Africa, China and Japan and was the first investment banker to become a regional head at the bank.
