Asiamoney New Silk Road Finance Awards

This award, while hotly contested, only really had possible one winner. Under its chairman, Gao Ming, Hong Kong-based ICBC (Asia) – which is a subsidiary of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China – has become a regional powerhouse in syndicated lending in a remarkably short space of time.

DBS’s importance to the Belt and Road Initiative becomes more apparent every year. Over the last 12 months, the Singapore-based lender provided financial advice and services to five projects backed by mainland corporates in three BRI countries.

Chances are, when you stumble upon a sizeable China-backed deal to invest in infrastructure in Pakistan, Habib Bank Ltd is involved. The Karachi-based financial institution, Pakistan’s largest lender by assets, wins plaudits and prizes this year, courtesy of a $520 million lignite coal-based power project in Sindh province. The deal was signed in December 2018 and the project will be built by Thar Energy, a consortium run by chief executive Saleemullah Memon, and comprising Hub Power Company, which owns 60% of the plant, local chemicals firm Fauji Fertiliser and China Machinery & Engineering Corporation.

Many international banks start pitches for awards by extolling their unrivalled understanding of local markets. HSBC is one of the few that lives up to the boast. Across south Asia, it had a leading role in a slew of BRI deals. In Sri Lanka, it acted as sole mandated lead arranger, lender and agent on a $72 million, Sinosure-supported facility to finance the upgrading of hospitals in Sri Lanka.

In essence, the BRI is little more than a big and ambitious country’s outward-facing trade policy, which happens to hit more Asian economies than it misses. Each year it grows and matures. Perhaps the key BRI change over the last year has been India’s tentative embrace of the project. Standard Chartered’s pitch for this award is evidence of India’s wary but undeniable acceptance that the BRI is a long-term reality that it can no longer afford to ignore.

Few lenders were quicker to spot the benefits of China’s Belt and Road Initiative than Habib Bank Ltd. Over the last decade, HBL has been Beijing’s go-to financial partner in Pakistan, and a vital player in its efforts to draw south Asia tightly into its economic and financial orbit.

Standard Chartered spotted the benefits of China’s Belt and Road Initiative from the start. With 160 years of experience in China and 150 years of history in south Asia – where it is present in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, with 250 branches and 14,000 employees – StanChart saw from the outset that it and the BRI were a natural fit.

Bank of China (BOC) has been at the forefront of BRI projects in south Asia, and a regional pioneer among mainland banks. Over the last three years, it has pitched for these awards several times, relying on its presence in a host of deals such as the 10-year, $700 million syndicated term loan raised for Pakistan’s finance ministry in December 2017. BOC was a key player in that deal, which secured partial guarantees from the World Bank.

When Cosco Shipping International (Singapore) announced its intention to buy Cogent Holdings, the deal made not only great practical sense, but also served to underline the speed with which the Belt and Road Initiative has become an integral part of the financial and commercial world.