Approach
Underwriting the place
Vindician Capital is an investor. Founded in 2014 to lend, it is now a family office in constitution and a specialist investment manager in practice, with entities in London, the Cayman Islands and the United Arab Emirates. It takes positions it expects to hold for a very long time, and the discipline lies in treating that freedom as an obligation to the places where the money is at work.
Underwriting
Underwriting the decade
Small island states are commonly described by their risks: exposure, limited scale, distance from markets. The risks are real, and they are also the reason so little long-term capital arrives. They are priced as honestly as we know how, and each project is then tested against the assumption that no buyer ever appears, since one worth backing ought still to make sense if it is never sold at all. The assumption is a test and not a forecast; a project able to stand without a buyer is, as a rule, the one others later find easiest to finance. Most enquiries are answered with an opinion and go no further, which is the honest outcome for the greater part of them, and the few on which the firm does take a view receive a good deal more than an opinion.
Nature on the balance sheet
In the places where the firm invests, these are productive assets, and they are depleting ones. A return drawn out of them amounts to a loan taken, without asking, from the people the investment was meant to serve, and the firm would rather not take it. Underwriting the place means costing that in at the outset, where it can still change a decision.
Proven technology, unfamiliar setting
The innovation in question is seldom scientific. It generally consists in getting something that already works — desalination, waste-to-value, distributed renewables — to run reliably on an island, at a price an ordinary household can carry.
Benefit that remains local
Employment, skills, offtake and, wherever it can be arranged, ownership should remain in the region. A project that exports the whole of its value has arguably solved a different problem from the one it was brought in to address.
The engagement fits the case
No two of these companies want the same thing. One needs a study before it can ask anyone for anything; another needs a conversation with a ministry that would otherwise take two years to arrange; another needs a first plant, and the means to build it. What the firm does is set by the stage a company has reached and the outcome it is trying to reach, and the terms follow the work. There is little that is standard in any of it, and less that could usefully be made so.
An answer, either way
Whether the answer is yes or no, it ought to arrive promptly and with its reasons attached. A slow maybe costs a counterparty rather more than a refusal does, and in markets of this size very little is forgotten.
The reef, the aquifer and the soil are on the balance sheet, whether or not the accounts show them.
Stewardship
Ownership as a beginning
The firm stays close to what it holds, and closer still to the people running it. A good deal of the work sits around the investment rather than inside it: shaping an idea, adapting a technology to a harder setting, raising and structuring the capital that follows, advising through offtake and permitting. The operating decisions are then left with those best placed to take them.