Allianz Global Investors (AllianzGI) has made two new hires as it bolsters its infrastructure debt team to meet the burgeoning pipeline of deals.
Nicolas Lucas joins the growing infrastructure debt team at AllianzGI in a newly created role expanding their execution capacity. He will report into Adrian Jones, director of infrastructure debt.
Lucas has over seven years of experience within infrastructure and more than nine years of experience in the financial services industry. He joins AllianzGI from The Royal Bank of Scotland where he was vice president in infrastructure, power & utilities. Prior to this he held analyst and asset management roles at Société Générale in New York, Calyon in Paris, and Carmignac Gestion in Paris.
Alexander Ball joins the team as an associate. He joins most recently from RBC Capital Markets where he was an analyst in the acquisition & leveraged finance team for the last two years, gaining experience in the origination, execution and distribution of infrastructure financing transactions in the airport, road, utilities and energy sectors.
Both Lucas and Ball will be based in London.
Deborah Zurkow, chief investment officer and head of infrastructure debt at AllianzGI, says: “We are very pleased to welcome Nicolas and Alexander on board. They will play an important part in our ambitious plans to grow and deepen our expertise in this specialist sector.
"AllianzGI’s infrastructure debt team aims to facilitate institutional investors’ access to the growing infrastructure senior debt market, while providing governments and infrastructure sponsors with new sources of long-dated financing. We believe our expert credit analysis is where we can add particular value for our clients by bridging the long-term funding gap created by shrinking government budgets and the retreat of the banks. There’s a substantial pipeline of projects both in the UK and across mainland Europe, with estimated between EUR1.5trn and EUR2trn of investment needed in European infrastructure over the course of this decade. By further growing our team we will have the resources and expertise to get under the bonnet of the numerous potential projects so we can identify – and then appropriately structure – the right ones for our clients.
“Infrastructure debt represents a potentially attractive outcome for clients, particularly long term investors faced with low to negative real returns on their sovereign bond holdings. We have in place the right expertise to enable European institutional investors to access this growing asset class.”
