Apollo and Standard Chartered eye $3bn for ‘unprecedented capital market opportunity’

Earlier this month, Apollo Global Management and Standard Chartered announced that they will come together with a long-term strategic partnership aimed at leveraging the origination and distribution expertise of the two firms to accelerate financing for global infrastructure, clean transition technology and renewable energy.

Apollo-owned infrastructure debt origination platform Apterra will take the lead on origination for the funding after Standard Chartered acquired a minority stake in the platform. Apollo Clean Transition Capital, the firm’s sustainable private credit and hybrid investing strategy, will join Standard Chartered to help provide $3 billion of funding for clean energy and transition projects.

The announcement was made shortly after Apollo revealed plans to acquire mid-market asset manager Argo Infrastructure Partners, which represented a sizeable increase in its infrastructure assets under management.

“Apollo has real conviction around the unprecedented opportunities around sustainable projects,” Apollo partner and ACT Capital president Samuel Feinstein told Infrastructure Investor. “The numbers are staggering, driven by this global industrial renaissance.”

To that end, Feinstein indicated that Apollo and Standard Chartered both seek to create multiple avenues of origination, which the build-out of Apterra will provide.

“It will allow us to tap in more closely to what Standard Chartered is doing on their origination side and it’s another way for them to more efficiently put their balance sheet to work,” he said.

“The partnership allows Standard Chartered to put its own balance sheet to work in new deals either originated from Apterra or other sources that ACT Capital will ultimately hold,” Feinstein explained. “It also increases the breadth and size of the opportunities we can pursue and to which we can commit.”

Feinstein added that Apollo is known for saying that the world needs $75 trillion in capex over the next 10 years, and that the firm is well positioned to help meet that need across different forms, including energy transition, utilities and digital infrastructure projects.

“Private credit is probably where we will be the most meaningful player in the marketplace. Standard Chartered has a very similar view of the world on this topic,” Feinstein continued.

“Standard Chartered and Apollo have complementary origination and distribution capabilities, which increase the scale of the financing we can jointly deploy, and the size of the projects in which we can participate,” Bill Winters, group chief executive of Standard Chartered, said in a statement. “We are very pleased to build on our long-term partnership with Apollo to both expand our existing geographical coverage and mobilise capital to these critical parts of the global economy.”

“Apollo is obsessed about origination,” Feinstein noted. “The limiter of our ability to grow is really our ability to originate good investment opportunities that have excess return per unit of risk.”

The resulting arrangement is complex, but according to Feinstein, is worth it for all parties.

“It’s a great opportunity to take another step forward with the Apterra business that we’ve been building. ACT Capital is really focused on opportunities around renewable energy, industrial decarbonisation and sustainable mobility, and does primarily private credit but with some hybrid investments into the fund as well” Feinstein said. “Apterra typically syndicates out to other funds and investors, including  ACT Capital.”

The Apollo-backed Apterra was founded in 2023 and has executed more than $4.8 billion of transactions, according to a statement. ACT was founded in the same year, and leads on Apollo’s pledge to deploy $50 billion in clean energy and climate capital by 2027.