What is Banking and Finance Law?
It essentially concerns the lending and borrowing of money between banks and companies or individuals. However, the practice area is split into different sub-divisions:
- Asset Finance is the lending of money to a borrower in order to buy an asset such as a ship, aircraft or machinery;
- Project Finance is the lending of money in order to fund an infrastructure project where the loan is then paid back by the money raised by the project itself;
- Real Estate Finance is the lending of money in order to fund the acquisition of property or its redevelopment;
- Acquisition Finance is the lending of a large sum of money to a company so that it can buy another company and includes leveraged buyout finance where the borrower uses mostly the lenders money and little of their own capital to buy the company;
- Islamic Finance is the lending of money in a way that is Sharia law compliant, so the deal is structured so that there is no interest paid or collected on the loan.
Due to the nature of many banks and private equity funds, much of this work is of an international nature.
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