Situations
Whether a maturity, a capex programme, an acquisition or a legacy capital structure: your negotiating position is set before you approach the first lender.
Refinancing & maturities
A maturity is the one situation whose date is fixed from the outset, and still the one most often started too late. Twelve to eighteen months out, the facility is not yet a current liability, a second attempt would still be possible, and the pressure to settle is not on you. Six months out, you negotiate against a price the calendar sets.
Growth, capex & project finance
Growth rarely fails on the first investment; it fails on the third, when the structure built for one project no longer carries the programme. What matters is whether debt capacity and covenant architecture reflect the full investment cycle or only the next step. On a single project the timetable sets the deadline in any case: grid connection, construction start and grant approval all have cut-off dates, and the construction phase needs a financing that already knows at first drawdown what it will look like after commissioning.
Acquisition finance & transactions
In a transaction the financing is not a downstream step, it is part of the offer. Whether a commitment is in place at signing, and on what terms, helps decide both the award and the price. On the sell side the same applies in reverse: a case that needs explaining sells more easily with a financing supplied alongside it.
Capital structure, covenants & terms
The situation with no external deadline, and therefore the one left longest: movement usually comes only when a covenant blocks a commercial decision. A lender group grown over years rarely reflects the market that would be relevant to you today. What an opening would be worth can be calculated in advance: against debt capacity, against the covenant architecture, and against what other classes of capital charge for the same risk.
Common questions
Rarely, in practice, because the process is transparent. The house bank hears from us that it is part of the process and receives the same materials and deadlines as every other lender. It loses the role of sole counterparty; the relationship stays. Banks that have known the company for years hold an information advantage and often win such a competition. Terms that have not been tested against the market for a long time do, however, come under review.
Three questions help, and none of them needs preparation. Is there a date that someone else has set, such as a maturity, a bid deadline, a grant cut-off or a signing? Then the lead time counts back from that date. Does the next commercial decision require a consent under the existing loan agreement? Then the negotiation with the banks has effectively already begun. And do you know what your existing financing would cost in today’s market? If not, a market check is the obvious first step, and it takes little effort.
The effort is concentrated at the start and during the credit process. At the start we need the numbers, the contracts and a plan that carries your assumptions; we produce the financial model, the lender materials and the approach. During the credit process, questions come back that only your people can answer, for example on technical detail, customer contracts or shareholder matters. Plan for a few hours a week at managing-director or finance-director level during that phase. We bundle lender questions into one shared Q&A list so that your team does not handle each request separately.
We typically work on financings from EUR 5m upwards. The threshold is soft, because a debt advisory process with lender competition takes similar effort over several months regardless of the size of the financing. Below that level we are still glad to talk about a mandate where structure and fee fit that effort. Another factor is whether the structure of the project will attract interest from capital providers.
Refinancing, covenant reset or acquisition: lead time shapes the negotiating position. If something like this is coming up, an early and confidential conversation is the cheapest point to have it.