PGGM and Alecta invest in BBVA’s inaugural project finance risk sharing transaction
14 January 2022
Alecta and PGGM are pleased to announce they entered into an inaugural credit risk sharing transaction with BBVA based on the bank’s project finance activities. The transaction relates to a € 500 million portfolio of loans, representing a wide variety of projects in especially Spain and Western Europe. The portfolio is a cross-section of BBVA’s overall project finance loan book and consists for about one third of loans to renewable energy related projects, as that has been a clear focus in BBVAs origination activities. BBVA retains a risk alignment of minimally 20% for each project in the portfolio.
BBVA has been actively using balance sheet synthetic securitisation to capitalise their small- and medium sized lending activities, and is now expanding this to its project finance loan book. This is a further step in the sophistication of risk management in its wholesale banking business. BBVA has a proven track record in project finance lending, which is managed by BBVA’s Corporate & Investment Banking unit, focussing on its core markets and building on its relationships with key clients.
PGGM has been growing a portfolio of Credit Risk Sharing (“CRS”) investments for PFZW (the € 265 billion pension fund for Dutch healthcare workers) since late 2006. It is one of the most experienced and largest investors in this field, and one which has, uniquely, a dedicated allocation to CRS investments. As part of their ambition to expand into private market assets, Alecta decided to build a sizeable portfolio of CRS transactions by entering into a co-investment agreement with PGGM in April 2020.
PGGM has been investing in project finance risk transaction since 2008 and sees it as a valuable addition to its dedicated CRS investment portfolio. It offers welcome diversification versus corporate credit risk based investments. Next to that, project finance provides excellent opportunities to contribute to the real economy and climate focused investment in particular. Knowing that project finance loan books are not as diversified as corporate loans books, PGGM looks to participate in well-structured transactions with a robust risk-return profile, meaning that the performance should not be fully driven by one or two single defaults.
Source: PGGM
