Asiamoney New Silk Road Finance Awards

The Middle East and Africa boast some of the largest investment flows from China globally, and so far Chinese state-owned banks have dominated the funding needs of Belt and Road projects in the region.

This wasn’t the biggest Belt and Road transaction on the table this year in southeast Asia – far from it. China does a lot of business in the Asean region, much of it in the shape of big-ticket oil and gas, mining, transport and telecoms deals.

Many of the big cross-border financing deals HSBC does for its big corporate customers in southeast Asia should come with the letters ‘BRI’ pre-stamped on them. The bank is a powerhouse in the region, but more importantly, its sophisticated financial expertise so often seems to match and overlap, with eerie precision, exactly what China is trying to do with BRI.

So often, Maybank is a bank of firsts, at least where the Belt and Road Initiative is concerned.

Siam Commercial Bank emerges as a worthy winner of this award. The Bangkok-based lender is an important regional financial partner for China and for mainland firms, small and large.

It is the depth and the weight of Standard Chartered’s BRI-related deal list over the last year that tips the scales in favour of the emerging market-focused lender.

CICC has become a go-to bank for Chinese and other corporations looking to raise money via the capital markets along the Belt and Road. Beyond greater China, its stronghold is southeast Asia, where in recent years it has quietly become a deal machine.

Year after year, Bangkok Bank quietly goes about getting business done. In the context of this award, it is a force for innovation and for good, its five full-service branches in China (in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chongqing and Xiamen) helping it to play a big role for Beijing’s biggest corporations and lenders in and across southeast Asia.

At $72 million, the winning project is definitely not the largest Belt and Road Initiative-related transaction in the region over the last year. But its complexity and its value, which really emerges only with the benefit of hindsight, truly resonate.