Why infra debt might be bigger than equity in five years’ time

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but a funny thing has happened over the last four years. Private infrastructure debt, initially an opportunistic play created by banks’ retreat from project finance in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has solidified into a fully fledged asset class. And here’s the rub: it might soon outgrow equity. 

Don’t take my word for it. In a recent conversation with us, IFM Investors chief executive Bret Himbury pointed out that, while the firm’s infrastructure equity business has registered the most growth over the last few years, he expects infrastructure debt to potentially grow more significantly over the next five years.

The reason for that is simple, but powerfully compelling – and will certainly be a key talking point at our upcoming Debt and Project Finance Forum in Berlin next month. Institutional investors are allocating to infrastructure debt out of their fixed income buckets. The latter are much bigger than their alternatives allocations, which fund their infrastructure equity investments. With more and more investors looking for alternatives to traditional fixed income instruments, a relatively modest shift to infrastructure debt from this very large pool can lead to significant growth.

Take German investors, which have been allocating strongly to infrastructure debt. According to a recent survey by Greenwich Associates, based on interviews with 274 professionals from Germany’s largest institutional investors, average fixed income allocations stood at 74 percent in 2015. Alternatives? A mere 3 percent. You can see where this is headed.

Of course, the important questions for this scenario to pan out are: has infrastructure debt truly outgrown its origins as an opportunistic play? And does it have the required long-term drivers needed to sustain the kind of growth that could, in five years’ time, turn it into a force to be reckoned with? The answer to both seems to be yes.

There are two big drivers fuelling the fledgling asset class. The first is that banks, while very much back in the market now, especially in the senior debt space, are not doing the kind of long-term lending they were providing prior to the crisis. That is unlikely to change anytime soon given regulatory constraints. 

The second is that, while the current low interest rate environment might have prompted the ongoing fixed income diversification, that trend is not expected to violently reverse when rates go up. That’s not to say a rate rise might not curb investors’ risk appetite, especially if treasuries rally strongly. But, having suffered from the collapse in yields prompted by successive rounds of quantitative easing, diversification is now firmly on their mind. 

You can read about it in more detail in our upcoming infrastructure debt roundtable, to be published in March, but investors are creating increasingly larger allocations for infrastructure debt, attracted by its low-risk and liability-matching characteristics. With regulation, particularly in Europe, becoming increasingly favourable to infrastructure investments, those allocations are not expected to shrink anytime soon.

Like any nascent asset class, infrastructure debt offers plenty of challenges too. For example, the number of managers out there is still limited and the amount of products being offered has only recently started to grow. 

The senior debt space is already fiercely competitive, with the associated return compression that comes with that. Subordinated debt, which is less competitive, offers better pricing. But there are easily 50 shades of subordination out there, from fairly conservative subordinated debt to racy quasi-equity investments. Investors need to know what kind of strategy they are buying into, which isn’t always easy, since some of them go up and down the risk spectrum. 

Still, these are growing pains and growing pains are a necessary part of any asset class’ maturation. Plus, they’re the kind of growing pains that hint at depth. Watch this space.

What do you think: are wholesale 'rollovers' the future of infrastructure exits? Write to the Editor at bruno.a@peimedia.com