The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is looking to sell bundled portfolios of its loans to private investors, starting with an initial $200 million tranche, as the multilateral lender pushes further into an “originate-to-share” model designed to free up its balance sheet for additional lending across emerging markets.
A Strategy Years in the Making
EBRD President Odile Renaud-Basso has been signaling this shift for some time, previously describing the bank’s approach to loan sales and risk transfer as a deliberate effort to create space on its balance sheet while also building investor familiarity with development finance as an asset class. The latest initiative to bundle and sell loans directly to buyers builds on that broader strategy, extending an approach the bank has been steadily developing through several precursor transactions over the past year.
Building on the Mosaic Transaction
The bundled loan sale follows the EBRD’s inaugural securitization, a €1 billion transaction branded “Mosaic” that launched earlier this year as the bank’s first major significant risk transfer deal. That transaction was structured as a synthetic securitization, transferring credit risk on a diversified portfolio of EBRD assets to private investors and insurers while keeping the underlying loans on the bank’s own balance sheet. Mosaic was split into an €835 million senior tranche retained by the EBRD, a €145 million mezzanine tranche split between institutional investor PGGM and insurers including AXA XL, AXIS Capital, and Liberty Mutual, and a smaller €20 million junior tranche also retained by the bank. The portfolio underpinning that deal spanned more than half of the economies in which the EBRD operates, covering sectors including sustainable infrastructure, corporate financing, and financial institutions.
The new bundled loan initiative appears to represent a further evolution of that approach, moving toward direct sales of loan portfolios rather than purely synthetic risk transfer, giving private investors more direct exposure to the EBRD’s underlying lending book.
Part of a Broader Push Across Development Finance
The EBRD’s move fits within a wider trend among multilateral development banks seeking to mobilize private capital more efficiently. The Inter-American Development Bank’s private-sector arm, IDB Invest, previously completed a $1 billion synthetic risk transfer transaction, transferring mezzanine risk on a portfolio of corporate, project finance, and financial institution loans to investment firm Newmarket Capital Group, with a more senior layer of risk transferred in unfunded form to insurers Axis and Axa. The International Finance Corporation has similarly pursued major trade finance securitizations, with named private investors taking on every part of the capital stack in recent deals.
Industry observers have noted that investor appetite for this kind of development finance product has proven stronger than some anticipated, with roughly half a dozen insurance companies and a similar number of funded investors submitting competing bids for the mezzanine tranches in the EBRD’s Mosaic transaction alone.
Why This Matters for EBRD’s Lending Capacity
For the EBRD, the ability to bundle and sell portions of its loan book directly addresses a persistent tension facing development banks: balancing the desire to expand lending across emerging and developing economies against the practical limits of its own balance sheet capacity. By transferring loans or associated risk to private investors, the bank can recycle capital more quickly into new projects rather than holding loans to maturity, effectively multiplying the development impact of each dollar it originates. In 2025 alone, the EBRD provided €16.6 billion of its own financing while helping attract an additional €26.8 billion from private and institutional partners, underscoring how central capital mobilization has become to the bank’s broader operating model.
What Comes Next
With the initial $200 million tranche serving as an early test of investor appetite for this more direct approach to loan sales, the EBRD’s ability to scale the program will likely depend on how smoothly this first transaction is absorbed by the market. Should demand prove robust, the bank appears positioned to expand the model further, following the same trajectory that took its securitization efforts from an initial concept discussed with private investors to a fully executed billion-euro transaction within roughly a year.
