Green Delta Capital is one of the newer faces in investment banking in Bangladesh. Formed by the country’s largest insurance company, which has support from the private investment arm of the World Bank, it sees itself as an investment bank that can do good.
Its greatest influences are multilateral lenders such as the World Bank, not swashbuckling global investment banks, and its principles are drawn from those of various international development finance institutions.
“Anything that has non-environmentally friendly projects or that is doing something non-environmentally friendly, we don’t take it,” says Rafiqul Islam, managing director and chief executive of Green Delta Capital.
While that approach might seem to limit the scope for business in a frontier market, there are plenty of environmental, social and governance-related opportunities in Bangladesh, which has critically high pollution levels and suffers from devastating annual floods.
“We are looking at where the country is trying to change itself from an agriculture-based economy to a manufacturing economy,” adds Islam. “So one of our main focuses is the manufacturing sector.”
Keeping to its green and manufacturing focus, the bank signed a series of deals last year, including a pair of US dollar debt financings in the transportation sector.
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