Bangkok showed the money is there. The projects are not
The IMF and World Bank annual meetings returned to Bangkok this month for the first time since 1991. They confirmed what those of us who structure these deals already suspected: capital is no longer the scarce input. Bankable projects are.
The figure that travelled furthest was a record one with the World Bank mobilising $112 billion of private capital in the year to June, more than three times than in 2022, and issued over $25 billion in guarantees, hitting its 2030 target four years early.
This is a real achievement, but for those of us who spend our working lives on the other side of the table, structuring projects and talking to the investors who might fund them, the more revealing moment came in a smaller room.
For the first time, ASEAN finance ministers sat down together with the World Bank and asked for more guarantees, more technical assistance and more help building the capacity to prepare projects that investors will fund. Frederick Go, the Philippine Finance Secretary, put it plainly: the Bank could help the region "turn bankable ideas into investable projects", an argument I have long advocated for.
That phrase captures where the real bottleneck sits today. The capital is rarely the problem; pension funds, insurers and sovereign investors are looking for long-term assets with steady returns -- and infrastructure in growing economies should be exactly that. Governments, for their part, need roads, power and water faster than their budgets allow. What sits between the two is a shortage of projects that are ready to be funded.
The World Bank's own numbers point the same way. Private capital mobilised for upper-middle-income countries rose from $12 billion to $50 billion over four years, and for lower-middle-income countries from $14 billion to $37 billion. In low-income countries it held at about $3 billion. Many things explain that gap, including credit ratings, currency risk and debt levels, but project readiness is near the top of the list. Capital tends to go where the groundwork has already been done.
So what makes a project investable? Investors need a revenue stream they can forecast, whether that is a toll, a tariff or a payment from government. They need contracts and regulation that will still look the same in 15 years. They need a sensible answer to currency risk, because a fund paying pensions in sterling or dollars cannot simply absorb a fall in the local currency. And they need each risk to sit with whoever is best placed to manage it, backed by a delivery plan and a supply chain that can actually be executed.
Thailand's finance minister, Ekniti Nitithanprapas, made a related point in Bangkok when he asked the World Bank to help remove the regulatory barriers holding back the ASEAN Power Grid, the long-planned network of cross-border electricity links. The obstacle he named was the rulebook, not the money.
There was encouraging news on the other side of the market too. The day after the Bangkok meeting, the heads of the major development banks met in Manila and moved towards a joint fund that would sell existing development loans to institutional investors, having first tested demand with leading asset managers. If it works, it frees the banks to lend again and gives long-term savers a route into assets that have usually stayed on the banks' own books.
The test of the World Bank’s reform agenda should not be how much private capital it can claim to have mobilised, but how many projects reach financial close. Those are very different numbers, and only the second one builds a power line. If the next set of meetings is to report something more useful than another record, it should publish both.
Rupin Banker is an entrepreneur, investor and strategic adviser with more than three decades of experience in infrastructure finance, international trade, supply-chain management and private investment. His work is focused on emerging economies across South and South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
