Gulf One Investment Bank structure

Gulf One Investment Bank was co-founded in 2006 as a sharia-compliant investment bank by the current chief executive officer (CEO) Nahed Taher and Ziyad Omar, the current chief investment officer. Taher is a former chief economist at National Commercial Bank in Jeddah and one of the most prominent businesswomen in the Gulf. She is also the first female CEO of a bank in the GCC.

Gulf One is headquartered in Bahrain and has $1bn in capital, of which $111m is paid-up. The bank is organised into four major business lines: infrastructure investment; private equity; advisory; and asset management.

The share capital is widely held among key GCC institutional and individual investors. The bank recorded profits of $6.5m in 2009, from a total income of $19.4m.

Gulf One Investment Bank operations

Gulf One focuses on energy-related and infrastructure opportunities in the GCC. It has made a number of direct investments in various sectors, including transport, clean energy, water treatment, aerospace, technology development, and social infrastructure. 

Gulf One says it is the only investment bank in the Middle East focused on knowledge-based infrastructure projects and companies. The bank’s leadership believes reliance on international banks to finance long-term public-private partnerships (PPP) projects in the region will never be sufficient, insisting a local capability must be developed to fill that vacuum.

Gulf One forms strategic alliances with international investment banks and corporations to collaborate on infrastructure and industrial deals. It has teamed up with regional and international partners, including UK law firm DLA Piper, Dublin-based Depfa Bank, Doha-based Gulf Organisation for Industrial Consulting, and France’s Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking.

Unlike the majority of banks in the region, Gulf One has made a calculated decision to avoid investments in the real-estate sector. It maintains real-estate projects should be financed through mortgages or specialised companies due to certain risk-return principles and management issues that do not match with the goals of banks.

Gulf One has had an active portfolio of infrastructure investments. Since 2007, it has helped finance the construction of two Hajj terminals at Saudi airports in Jeddah and Medina, and a desalination plant in Jeddah. Gulf One also owns a stake in Moya Dayen, a Singapore-based water company.

The bank has launched a number of private equity funds. In June, it announced it would start a new e100m ($138m) fund to invest in German technology companies, with a focus on aviation and desalination.

Gulf One Investment Bank ambitions

Gulf One aims to become a regional leader in infrastructure financing.

The bank is preparing to widen its mandate, in particular capitalising on the research background of its leadership. In 2008, it launched the Gulf One Centre for Economic Research at Lancaster University in the UK to work jointly on research for Islamic and infrastructure financing methods and to give training courses in these fields.

The bank says Islamic finance in the infrastructure and PPP sector is still in its infancy, and as such it aims to contribute to the development of structural financial instruments and methods.

Although currently focused on the GCC from its Bahrain base, Gulf One’s long-term aim is to increases its geographic spread. Its Singapore investment and the UK initiative are indicative of this. Gulf One has also identified the Far East as a key market due to rapid demand growth and the need for expansion in various sectors related to the bank activities.

Gulf One’s investments abroad are not just based on profitability. The major goal of its international investments is to invest in companies that have a strategic business role in the industrial or infrastructure sectors within the GCC region.

The bank’s leadership says the global financial crisis has created a raft of opportunities for mergers, acquisitions, and strategic collaboration in financing asset-based companies with strong potential demand.