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Vectors Angel is the first and only angel group that focuses exclusively on impact investment. Our focus areas include but not limited to sustainabitliy, health and wellness, and empowerment.

Accelerating the Deployment of Renewables via Banyan Infrastructure

4 min readApr 18, 2021

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The Covid-19 pandemic and the Biden administration have increased investors’ interest in more sustainable assets. In 2020, the green finance market reached its most substantial milestone yet, with $1 trillion in cumulative issuance. The upcoming $2 trillion infrastructure bill will bring additional opportunities. However, investors are facing a dilemma — they currently rely on spreadsheets, manual workflows, and management expertise to manage these opportunities. Lending processes are struggling to scale as demand increases.

What’s not working?

The status quo of project financing is that capital is expensive, risks are not well understood, and it usually takes months to close. Processes and data sets are not standardized, so analysts often spend half of their time just aggregating and cleansing data. Unlike mortgages or other financial assets, renewable energy investments and loans require far more time-intensive reporting and performance tracking to manage risk. There is too much information and too many dots to connect if it’s all done manually, especially for smaller projects. This lengthy process often makes the cost of capital higher than is necessary, limiting lenders’ ability to scale their infrastructure portfolios.

There must be a better way.

Amanda Li, previously an investor at Generate Capital, experienced the pain points firsthand and understood that scaling infrastructure needed a technology-driven solution. Her co-founder, Tad Neeley, encountered the same problem on the project developer side while leading large-scale deals. Led by Will Greene, a repeat entrepreneur and passionate technologist with six successful exits, they decided to tackle infrastructure project market needs.

Enter Banyan Infrastructure — an automated loan and risk management data platform for banks and operators to originate, service, and securitize infrastructure loans and investments, starting with the renewables vertical.

Reducing Complexity Increases Margin

Banyan firmly believes that capital markets can be approached more quickly when lenders have accurate and timely data to audit and analyze the assets. If they reduced data and workflow complexity, lenders could improve financing costs, fund more projects, and find upside through new liquidity.

Banyan started by streamlining the loan data and building out analytics and visualization, giving lenders both a 30,000-foot view of their infrastructure portfolio and details around individual loan projects. They also simplified the compliance and reporting process, making risk management tasks more manageable. Under the hood, the platform will leverage smart contracts to enforce a single source of truth for project-related data and allow for future potential with additional automation.

One of Banyan’s customers estimates that their organization saves 1,400 hours annually using the platform. Between time and motion decreases, risk reduction, and increased liquidity, the platform can unlock more than 150bps in savings and profit upside on a portfolio — a substantial margin that capital market participants can use to grow.

The future is Bright

Later this year, Banyan will roll out the loan origination application augmenting their existing loan servicing product and empowering their clients to underwrite loans with smart checklists. These connected workflows will give lenders additional clarity and transparency in their underwriting process through to servicing. Banyan’s medium and longer-term road map includes facilitating loan servicing, securitization, and syndication processes for lenders and owner-operators. Banyan aspires to become the end-to-end solution in infrastructure financing.

Although present focusing on the renewables market such as wind and solar, Banyan’s platform will also work with other infrastructure projects. Additional infrastructure opportunities include the electrical vehicles market (2.5M EVs by 2023), 5G telecom infrastructure (67% CAGR), as well as the $600B waste market.

Why We Invest in Banyan

With the potential $2.1 billion American Jobs Plan and the uptick in interest in green infrastructure, project financing will take center stage over the next ten years. Between the move by many countries, states, and companies to go net-zero, decarbonize, and electrify everything, the wave of interest in financing sustainable projects will continue to grow.

As Bill Gates said in his new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, “What we need to do is spend the next decade getting the right policy, technology, and market structures in place so most of the world can be at zero emissions by 2050. We don’t have any time to waste.” The world needs and wants sustainable infrastructure. We believe Banyan Infrastructure is on its way to becoming the go-to platform for sustainable finance.

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Vectors Angel
Vectors Angel

Published in Vectors Angel

Vectors Angel is the first and only angel group that focuses exclusively on impact investment. Our focus areas include but not limited to sustainabitliy, health and wellness, and empowerment.

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