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For UOB, the announcement of One Belt, One Road in 2013 was welcome vindication. Two years earlier, the Singapore bank had set up a foreign direct advisory unit based principally on Chinese overseas direct investment into southeast Asia. “The great beneficiary of our service over the last five years has been Chinese corporates,” says Sam Cheong, head of the unit. “This trend is just beginning.”

If there is one message Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) chairman Jin Liqun wants you to take away about Belt and Road, it is that AIIB is not the same thing. It is not the Silk Road Fund either. Despite what is widely said in international discussions, these things are not synonymous.

China has plenty of engines to get Belt and Road underway: Export–Import Bank of China, the China Development Bank, the enormous state-owned lenders. But it needs a dedicated, wealthy, powerful and politically enabled body to be the driver of the whole enterprise, and that is the Silk Road Fund.

Policy bank money is fine, to a point, but if China really wants an infrastructure plan to change the world, it is going to need private sector money to join the party. It is going to need names like Macquarie, historically thought of as an investment bank (which it still is), but today also one of the world’s largest infrastructure investors.

The Belt and Road Initiative offers much to the disparate markets of the Middle East and Africa, but not all those countries seem so enthusiastic in return.

China Development Bank (CDB) is, along with China Eximbank, a policy bank under the jurisdiction of the government and the State Council. It dates from March 1994 and has a history of infrastructure funding that long pre-dates Belt and Road. Signature developments include the Three Gorges Dam and Shanghai Pudong International Airport. It will be absolutely vital to Belt and Road.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is so vast and ambitious it can be difficult to understand how it will all work in practice – what makes a BRI undertaking, how will they be funded, will they be trophy projects or on commercial terms, how are they originated? – so Euromoney spoke to 16 institutions all looking at BRI from their own different perspectives.

The former Soviet states of central Asia and the Caucasus are ideally placed to benefit from the Belt and Road Initiative, but realizing their full potential will require reform as well as infrastructure development.

At the vanguard of the funding effort for the Belt and Road Initiative will be China’s state-owned commercial banks. All eyes are upon them and their lending practices. Will they be expected to pour funds into projects with a tenuous economic rationale in the interests of state policy? Or will they instead be able to assess BRI projects as they would any other enterprise, with a weighing up of risk and return and a commercial decision at the end of it?

With infrastructure ambitions on this scale, it is inevitable that some of the capital will be misspent. As McKinsey Asia-Pacific chairman Kevin Sneader observed in a recent podcast: “There is a real risk that this becomes a source of funding that gets mis-deployed and doesn’t end up contributing to greater trade or greater economic collaboration, but just gets wasted on projects that really should never have been funded in the first place.”

Chinese policymakers and firms are showing an increasing interest in central and eastern Europe – but will Beijing’s ambitious plans for infrastructure development put China on a collision course with the EU?

ICBC Standard Bank is an interesting institution. It is a legacy of ICBC’s landmark acquisition of a 20% stake in South Africa’s Standard Bank 10 years ago. In 2015, ICBC acquired a controlling stake in Standard Bank’s London-based global markets business. Today it stands as a financial markets and commodities bank serving ICBC clients’ global markets needs, with a separate business in the distribution of African risk. Still London-based, it focuses on global commodities, fixed income, currencies and equities.