Ambienta Credit

Ambienta Credit takes a flexible approach to investing in credit, looking for European environmental sustainability champions regardless of sector, by leveraging on Ambienta’s platform network and environmental expertise.

Ambienta has a clear investment approach, focused on capturing the opportunity presented by the intersection of long-term secular environmental trends within the universe of European lower-mid and mid-market companies.

Ambienta Credit represents a natural evolution of Ambienta’s strategy, given its pan-European and sector-agnostic approach and its exclusive focus on environmental sustainability.

Ambienta Credit combines Ambienta’s knowledge-based sourcing approach, platform synergies and existing credit relationships to identify transactions with superior risk-return profiles. We act as a partner to borrowers and owners, providing management teams access to our leading in-house ESG and sustainability professionals, as well as the credibility and validation that it provides to a company’s sustainability thesis.

From Ambienta’s interactions with European mid-market environmental corporate champions, we identified that many of them appreciated Ambienta’s insight and value-add, but were not ready to enter into a private equity transaction. Offering them credit financing solutions to help them grow their leading businesses is therefore complementary to our offering.

 

Investment approach

Typical investment criteria

While there are no standard deals, the following are criteria that would typically be targeted when making an investment decision:

Market characteristics

Growing international end markets with strong environmental drivers

Company characteristics

  • Lower middle- and middle-market niche market leaders
  • Mission critical or cost advantageous products or services
  • Attractive financials: track record of growth, margins compared to peers and cash conversion
  • Strong management teams and ESG performance

Transaction characteristics

  • Appropriate leverage: assessed with reference to the defensive nature of the business, cash flow profile, equity cushion and underlying asset value
  • Contractual protections: appropriate security, guarantees and documentation, with a focus on having financial covenants and robust negative undertakings

Our team is comprised of top tier professionals coming from leading Credit institutions. The Ambienta Credit team can count on nearly 50 years of experience from the Partners, Ran Landmann and Nishan Srinivasan and will rely on the research and sustainability/ESG expertise of the professionals in the S&S team.

We partner with our dedicated Sustainability & Strategy team, that continually maps the effects of environmental trends across sectors and value chains: there is a research-led, deep-dive analytical approach to evaluating the universe of companies that fall within Ambienta’s primary target markets.

Since its foundation, Ambienta considered that having a material and measurable environmental impact is the best way of assessing a company’s competitive advantage and long-term growth opportunity. We have developed proprietary methodologies to assess this across asset classes. Our award-winning Environmental Impact Analysis tool, used to assess portfolio impact contribution to Resource Efficiency and Pollution Control through 11 different metrics, has been appropriately adapted to apply to Credit.

Ambienta has developed the ESG in Action programme to systematically embed ESG management guidelines and practices into our day-to-day operations. The integration of ESG forms part of Ambienta’s standard operating procedure and is considered integral to the investment process.

The objective of the ESG in Action programme in Credit is to engage companies on activities and efforts to achieve improvements over ESG metrics.

ESG in Action in Ambienta Credit