Portugal 
Italy 
Greece 
12 July 2018 – Expansión
Alantra has just signed a document that is going to make it the leading advisor to banks in Europe for the sale of toxic asset portfolios. The deal was signed yesterday in London and involves the purchase of KPMG’s international business specialising in those kinds of bank cleanups. The team comprises more than 35 professionals, mainly seniors, who will move across to form part of Alantra and who will take with them the sales mandates, worth €16 billion, that they are working on at the moment, according to sources at the firm.
After almost a year of negotiations with KPMG, the division is finally going to join forces with the investment banking team led by Santiago Eguidazu (pictured above) to create a new company with more than 75 professionals. The new company will be a subsidiary of Alantra and will be dedicated to advising banks regarding the best exits options for their portfolios of non-performing assets.
To date, Alantra has advised 80 operations in this business across five countries since 2014, for a total nominal value of more than €65 billion. Meanwhile, KPMG’s team has advised on more than 100 transactions worth €180 billion during the same period. The resulting company has averaged 45 transactions per year for the last four years and has advised an operation volume of more than €61 billion. The transaction will involve a cash disbursement for the Spanish firm of €2.83 million.
Banks and funds
The new division will be particularly active in the medium-sized transaction market generated by both banks and funds. The focus will be primarily on Europe, but also other countries around the world where the firm has a presence. In its activity, Alantra will compete above all with PwC, the other major player in the European portfolio business alongside KPMG, and with the US giants Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs for the largest contracts.
KPMG’s international team is headquartered in London, with local offices in Milan, Athens, Dublin and Lisbon. Alantra adds Madrid to that list, from where it has organised its global coverage of the portfolio business to date, which has seen it advise operations not only in Spain but also in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Eastern Europe.
The team at Alantra has been responsible for the sale of portfolios by almost all of the Spanish banks, ranging from Sabadell (with which it is working at the moment) to Santander, and including BBVA, CaixaBank, Bankia, Liberbank, Ibercaja and the domestic subsidiary of Deutsche Bank.
The current Head of Alantra’s Portfolio Business, Joel Grau, will lead the new subsidiary, together with Andrew Jenke and Nick Colman, from KPMG.
Global advice
Between the three of them, they will pursue the objective of replicating on a European scale the model that Alantra has been adopting in Spain, and which is based on providing global advise to banks from three perspectives: corporate operations, real estate (large properties and loans from financial entities, as well as those relating to shopping centres and hotels) and portfolios of toxic assets, according to sources at Alantra.
They will operate from two main centres: Madrid and London, where many of the funds that buy the banks’ portfolios are located and thanks to which the business is expected to soar, by reselling financial assets acquired or securitising them to put them on the market.
Original story: Expansión (by Inés Abril)
Translation: Carmel Drake