Abanca will take the boat as collateral, and front the subsidies that arrive late
Abanca Mar launched in Portugal on Thursday, lending to fishing, aquaculture, shipbuilding, ports, logistics, maritime tourism and offshore energy. It takes vessels as security and fronts public subsidies that have not yet landed.
A bank announcing that it lends to businesses is not news. A bank building a team that looks only at people who make their living from the sea says something about where it thinks the money is. Abanca launched Abanca Mar in Portugal on Thursday, a segment aimed at companies and sole traders in what gets called the blue economy.
The definition is deliberately wide. It takes in fishing, aquaculture, seafood processing and trade, shipbuilding and the yards that supply it, ports, logistics and maritime transport, coastal and marine tourism, and two areas that would not have made such a list a decade ago: offshore energy generation and marine biotechnology.
What makes it different from an ordinary loan
Two things, both to do with the rhythm of the sector. The first is medium and long-term lending secured by a mortgage on the vessel, which is to say taking the boat as collateral rather than demanding something else. That changes the conversation for an operator whose entire balance sheet floats.
The second is more practical than it sounds. These are short-term facilities to front public subsidies, covering the gap between making an investment and being paid the incentive for it. Anyone who applied for the fishing fuel rebate that opened this month knows the shape of the problem: the support exists, it arrives late, and in the meantime there are wages and fuel to pay.
The bank frames the bet around the country’s maritime scale, roughly 2,500 kilometres of coast and an exclusive economic zone of about 1.7 million square kilometres. Sara Monteiro, who coordinates the segment, sums up the case for specialising as spotting what is peculiar to each activity and fitting the product to its cycle.
Why now
Abanca has run this in Spain for more than a decade and is porting the model, with an approach it openly calls Iberian, because Portuguese and Spanish firms are already tightly linked in ship repair and in the seafood trade.
The timing helps too. Aquaculture is expanding, offshore renewables are moving off the drawing board, decarbonising ports and shipping forces capital spending, and European funds are paying for infrastructure upgrades and sustainable fishing. All of that generates investment, investment generates demand for credit, and credit is exactly where a bank wants to be standing when a sector starts to move.
What is missing is the size of it. Abanca published no lending envelope, no portfolio target and no expected number of deals, which makes it hard to tell a serious segment from a brand laid over the branch network it already has. The first real signal will be lending volumes to the sector, and those are several quarters away.
By Beatriz Mota
Image: Kolforn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
