Welcome to Federal Credit Fridays! The U.S. government is one of the largest lenders and credit guarantors on earth. Its portfolio is estimated at over $3.6 trillion, as measured by loan assets and the face value of loan guarantees. The government uses credit for a wide variety of policy missions, including housing, higher education, small businesses, rural and urban economic development, infrastructure, and export promotion, among others. This podcast will familiarize you with the vast world of federal credit, and we hope that you’ll learn about similarities and differences between these programs as well as the importance of their work to achieving policy missions within the framework of public-private collaboration.
In today’s podcast, I discuss federal infrastructure and energy finance, a rapidly expanding area of federal policy accelerated by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act as well as the Inflation Reduction Act. While over 90% of our nation’s infrastructure is owned and operated by local government and authorities, the federal government has been a huge source of infrastructure credit capital for generations. These two pieces of legislation are ramping up national infrastructure investment to levels we have not seen since the 1960s and 1970s, and this is especially true for energy and renewable energy projects.
As a lender and grant maker, the federal government has differing priorities than private capital. Unsurprisingly, this makes outreach, origination, underwriting, and portfolio management for federal credit slightly different when compared to best practices in the private sector.
Today, I’d like to dig deeply into the area of portfolio management for federal credit and tease out how it’s distinct from private credit. Portfolio management is a discipline that guides organizations to manage the performance of loans and grants that have been made in the past to ensure they are adhering to their award agreements and staying on track.
To shed some light on this, I have asked Katie Janik to join us today. She is a portfolio adviser in Summit’s federal transaction advisory practice and has substantial project finance experience, particularly in the renewable energy, oil and gas, and infrastructure sectors. Before joining Summit, Janik was a director at Transurban and the founding principal of Garnet 3 Consulting, which provided advisory, training, and information management services to protect her clients’ investments in renewable energy projects. Janik’s career has established her as a leader in project finance, asset monitoring, project restructuring, policy and procedure management, tax equity, and portfolio automation.
I hope you enjoy today’s conversation. Listen below and let us know what you think!
