We were established in 1963 as Export Finanzierungs AG (EFAG) by Switzerland’s Brown Boveri Corporation, which later merged with Sweden’s Asea to become ABB, the corporate entity within which most of Nordkap’s senior staff spent much of their professional lives. For the first thirty odd years of our existence, our task was to facilitate sales of ABB equipment by arranging export credit and similar facilities for equipment purchasers.
However, in 1996, after the completion of the merger that created ABB, we received a Swiss banking license and renamed ourselves ABB Export Bank, a part of ABB Structured Finance. As such, our mandate expanded to include many other infrustructure and industrial finance debt instruments. Given our successes and growing reputation in the marketplace, we also took on non-ABB mandates not directly linked to ABB and grew our balance sheet to over CHF 1,000,000,000.
During ABB’s financial difficulties in the early part of the century, ABB Structured Finance (including some of our staff) was sold to GE for US $2.7 billion, but ABB Export Bank was sold separately in 2003 to our current shareholders, a consortium of Swedish investors. When the current shareholders asked me to rejoin the newly renamed Nordkap Bank AG as Chief Executive Officer, I leapt at the opportunity.
In 2003, my CFO, Alois Alig, and I focused on the challenge of getting the bank up and running as a newly independent entity.
In 2004, we focused on building our balance sheet by purchasing a emerging markets portfolio of almost US $400 million, securing a funding facility of US $300 million and formalizing a long-term strategy. Also in 2004, our Chief Investment Officer, Stefan Gerig, joined and began to develop the strategy of focusing Nordkap’s development as a provider of infrastructure lending, arranging and advisory services.
2005 was another year marked by success as we increased our funding facility to US $400 million and won our first arranging mandate (which closed successfully).
2006 continued this success as we closed six more arranging mandates, grew our portfolio to in excess of CHF 550 million and secured our first financial advisory mandate.
While 2007 will be remembered as a very difficult year for comercial and investment banks, for Nordkap it was no less successful than previous years. We expanded our funding facility to US $500 million, hired our Head of Origination, Eric Sievers, to grow our advisory and arranging business, closed several more arranging mandates, secured three more advisory mandates for some of the largest and most interesting Russian and East European projects in the market, and took on a commitment from our shareholders to be a leader in renewables finance.
In 2008, Jeff Riopelle joined as Senior Vice President in charge of overall coordination, with Stefan, of our transactional matters. Additionally, we are very proud of the internal promotion, our first, of a long-standing employees to senior role. Kerstin Rotter has become Head of Portfolio Management.
Today, Nordkap remains a very well-capitalized niche bank. We are continuing to expand our loan portfolio, we are arranging loans in the finance and energy sectors of Russia, and we are acting as arranger and/or financial advisor for renewable energy projects in Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, South America and North America.
We take pride in being able to deliver to our clients top calibre advice and services without the impediments that so often come along with larger institutions. We’re fast, we’re responsive, and we’re a team of professionals that each has spent most of his or her life in comercial lending. What can we do for you?
Our focus
Our product lines – structured trade finance, export finance and project finance – are helping to shape future development in many emerging markets.
Structured trade finance transactions relate mainly to commodities. Financing is provided directly or indirectly to the commodity producer, in turn proceeds generated by selling commodities service the respective loan. These transactions provide countries with low or no credit ratings access to the international debt market, allowing pre-financing of production and export of commodities, which are essential for the economy of the exporting country.
Export / import finance transactions relate to loans that finance the export / import of capital goods and services to emerging markets. In many cases these transactions, with a mix of covered and uncovered portions, are the only way to obtain financing for borrowers in countries with low credit ratings.
Project finance allows borrowing for major infrastructure projects in developed or emerging markets. In many cases the borrower is a special purpose vehicle and financing is based on future cash flows generated by the project itself.