Investec Capital Markets has hired Chris Mitman to head up its export and agency finance team.

Mitman’s team is responsible for providing advisory and arranging services to clients seeking to evaluate or raise export credit agency-support debt for their projects.

The key sectors that Investec is looking to focus on are power, renewable, resources, infrastructure, telecoms, marine and aviation in North America, Southern Africa, Australia, Europe and India.

Mitman joins Investec from Dublin’s Export Credit Advisory, and before that he was ANZ’s global head of structured trade and export finance.

“Investec was already working with ECAs but needed a framework for growing these activities in amongst its existing businesses, which is where I came in,” Mitman explains to GTR.

“Investec is a fairly agile organisation, which also appealed to me. They’re a specialist bank, and this means that organisationally it was much easier to look at different ways to grow the business compared to some of our larger counterparts,” Mitman continues.

Investec’s export and agency finance team includes a number of large ticket deals on its books, such as South African airline Comair’s acquisition of four Boeing 737-800s, the Lagos Blue Line rail project in Nigeria and the 206MW Collgar wind farm in Australia.

“Investec is not just a senior debt arranger; we are also a project developer and lessor in our own right and therefore understand firsthand the challenges our clients face in mobilising projects/infrastructure investments including equity, mezzanine and senior debt financing

“Looking forward, there will be some new ECA coverage positions, which you always need in the ECA business, and then the other growth positions will be more industry-orientated. For example we will have people sitting in the relevant industry teams within Investec but specifically focussed on ECA solutions,” Mitman concludes.