Fleetscape Capital, an alternative capital provider to the maritime and offshore industries, entered into a financing structure with Macquarie Bank that provides an offer to vessel owners looking at higher leverage situations.

The financing provided by Macquarie is structured on securitization principles and enables Fleetscape to offer sale-and-leaseback or unitranche financing on competitive terms. Coupled with Fleetscape’s transaction-execution capabilities, the facility was designed to ensure that Fleetscape will remain a financing partner for mid-sized and smaller vessel owners and operators seeking to raise asset-backed financing beyond the capabilities of their existing banking relationships.

Eight tankers have already been financed in the new structure as of Feb. 15, and the vehicle will also include exposures to containerships and bulk carriers in the future. Fleetscape expects the total number of vessels financed to rise to double figures in Q1/21.

“Fleetscape focuses on providing financing to small and mid-sized shipping groups, a segment that has suffered from significant retrenchment from traditional commercial banks, resulting in many of them being underbanked,” Guillaume Bayol, managing director at Oaktree and co-portfolio manager of the Fleetscape platform, said. “This structure gives Fleetscape the ability to offer shipping groups lower and sustainable pricing whilst simplifying our documentation process and increasing our speed of execution. Fleetscape [is] already seeing an increase in demand from customers, including a number of new financings with target completion dates in Q1 of 2021.”

“This successful collaboration with Fleetscape is an exciting organic growth opportunity for Macquarie’s shipping finance team,” Marc Hari, executive director and head of shipping finance for Macquarie, said. “The capital provided to the shipping sector through this novel structure builds on our past work with Fleetscape and will provide ship owners with more options when looking for financing.”

Macquarie’s shipping finance business provides traditional bank debt to ship owners in the tanker, bulker and container segments.

Stephenson Harwood advised Fleetscape on the finalization of this new financing structure, with partner Ian Mace assisted by Don Brown, Jennifer Ashford and Roxanne Chambers. Watson, Farley & Williams advised Macquarie, with partners Jim Bell, Lindsey Keeble and Dominic Pearson assisted by Jane Keith, Zara Hammersley, Alex Clark, Elsa Savvatianou, Natalie Grundy, Tamara Ristic and Ella Vries.