Standard Bank and specialist intelligence advisory firm Pangea-Risk have joined forces to launch a project risk assessment product in Africa, GTR can reveal.
The bank’s energy and infrastructure finance team and Pangea-Risk collaborated to design the data-driven methodology, which aims to better assess opportunities and risks in high-risk markets, including areas such as critical minerals.
The Localised Opportunity and Risk Evaluation (Lore) framework is designed to give export credit agencies, private insurers and commercial banks specific data that goes beyond standard country risk ratings – particularly at subnational and sectoral level – to allow them to make more informed investment decisions.
“Lore is an analytical complement to sovereign ratings that aims to capture the subnational and sectoral dynamics that determine whether a project could be bankable within its local or global environment,” Standard Bank and Pangea-Risk said in a joint statement.
The framework aims to help stakeholders identify where sovereign ceilings may overstate or understate risk, they said, and where other logistical, contractual or social factors can “meaningfully shift a project’s risk profile”.
The digital framework produces a combined Lore score and grade derived from country, sector, subnational and resource-specific factors, with outputs mapped to typical OECD-style risk categories.
Screenshots shared with GTR show how users can drill down from national risk profiles to individual provinces – for instance, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – with each location accompanied by a qualitative assessment. A colour-coded regional map further highlights how subnational conditions can diverge sharply from sovereign averages.
The partners said the tool addresses a longstanding information gap that “translates into missed opportunities or unexpected losses, particularly in the complex African context”.
As part of the collaboration, Johannesburg-headquartered Standard Bank will contribute local contextual structuring and commercial insight from frontier and emerging markets across Africa, while Pangea-Risk will bring its country and political risk expertise, underpinned by its peer-reviewed methodology on country risk forecasting.
Gabrielle Reid, head of advisory at Pangea-Risk, said: “Our collaboration with Standard Bank’s team began with a simple but powerful question: how can we credibly and commercially assess project-level risk beyond sovereign baselines?
“That question led to the creation of the Lore framework, a data-driven tool capturing local governance, sector dynamics, and resource-specific resilience.”
The collaboration will officially launch at the Berne Union Project Finance meeting in Nairobi on November 19.
Bilal Bassiouni, head of risk forecasting at Pangea-Risk, said the event was “the perfect forum for the launch of this joint initiative with Standard Bank to reimagine project and resources risk in Africa”.
“We hope this new methodology will help turn risk into opportunity for critical minerals development across emerging and frontier markets, thus unlocking bankable projects that were previously deemed uninvestable,” he added.
