Ali Zaidi

Ali Zaidi

Partner

Ali is a senior finance and banking professional with over 20 years of experience. He specializes in arranging innovative financing solutions for clients and help them achieve their business goals. During his career, he has arranged over USD 25bn in funding across 100+ deals in various geographies and diverse sectors.

With his deep connectivity within UAE and regional financial institutions, he has helped clients raise financing for all business needs ranging from capex, working capital, permanent working capital, receivables monetization, acquisitions, asset finance, project finance or general corporate purposes.

He is currently leading the capital and debt structuring team of the Prodigyway International firm based out of the UAE. In his previous roles, he worked with SCB and FAB to develop and lead their structured finance and financing solutions business. Some of the solutions developed by Ali that helped clients include:
New Project (1)
  • Contractor-led extended payment terms – advised several large contracting firms across the region and developed templates that allowed extensions of payment terms to the project owners. This helped the clients win bids as they were providing financial relief through term loans to the project owners.
  • Supplier-led term loan - arranged a non-recourse term loan of AED 500m that helped our client win a major supply contract as they were providing financial relief to the buyer.
  • Infrastructure development financial advisory - Advising a regional authority mandated to develop the mass transport system of a large city on the various alternative financing options ranging from contractor led, ECA, PPP, bonds etc.
  • Rent to Own program for Developers – Advised developers and banks to develop a structure for a “limited recourse” bank facility through which the developers could offer post-handover payment plans to end buyers and sell inventory of apartments.
  • Cashflow backed loan restructuring – helped a developer restructure development loans for residential and hospitality assets by reprofiling them in line with the expected cashflows over the tenor of the loan.
  • Distress real estate deal – facilitated a large real estate transaction by identifying an institutional buyer that purchased a distressed real asset pool from a bank with stapled financing.
  • Innovative receivables backed structures – structured several innovative bilateral and syndicated loans for airlines (Gulf Air / Royal Jordanian) using IATA receivables, telco (Etisalat Misr / Telecom Egypt) using roaming cashflows, retailers using POS cashflows, healthcare using insurance cashflows and rental monetization for real estate owners.
  • Structured Trade Finance – structured several prepayment and pre export structured finance deals for producers across the region including the USD 1.25B syndicated prepayment facility for EGPC.

Ali is a fellow member of The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Pakistan and also holds an Associate membership of The Institute of Chartered Certified Accountants in UK.