Webinar on Local Currency Financing

The Berne Union hosted a webinar on the topic of Local Currency Financing (LCF), featuring presentations from Harald Hirschhofer, Senior Advisor at TCX, and Arun Sharma, Chief Investment Officer at IFC.

The full audio and slides from the webinar are available via the BU website.

LCF is an increasingly debated topic for medium/long term credits. Buyers in emerging markets with local currency income are keen to match this with local currency debt. This is also impacting on credit insurers, although, so far, cover for LCF has been relatively limited.

In the last few years, a number of providers of hedge solutions for local currency risk have come up. TCX, largely owned by development banks, and IFC, member of the World Bank Group, are among the main providers. Both institutions have now offered to present their local currency risk solutions in a webinar to the Berne Union members. The webinar is open to all members, but of particular interest to both ECAs and private medium/long term credit insurers.

Background information on the LCF facilities of TCX is available via their website, and their article in the latest BUlletin  (page 12)

Background information on the LCF facilities of IFC is available via the IFC / World Bank site.

Information about the presenters

Harald Hirschhofer is Senior Advisor at TCX. A trained macro-economist, he joined TCX at its beginning in 2008 to implement a macro-fundamental based pricing approach for currency hedging in small frontier markets. Today, he works on scaling up the development impact of TCX and on new strategic initiatives. Over the past years, a large part of his efforts has been dedicated to developing local currency financing solutions for infrastructure investments in frontier and emerging markets.  From 1994 to 2008, Harald worked at the IMF. Before that, he worked at the US House of Representatives in Washington and a London investment bank.

Arun Sharma is Chief Investment Officer with the Global Financial Markets Department of the International Finance Corporation and is based in Washington DC. He is responsible for a wide range of banking and financial market transactions in Emerging Markets. He also manages key client relationships for IFC and is involved in several global innovation initiatives. He is leading IFC’s programme to expand collaboration with ECAs and is leading innovation efforts in the areas of infrastructure finance, climate finance, affordable housing, and agribusiness finance in developing countries.