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BTS and YES Bank Identify Market Opportunities For Sustainability Investments In India

BTS Investment Advisors Limited (BTS), a financial services group focused on seizing the investment opportunities in India and the newly launched Indian YES Bank Limited announce their collaboration to develop sustainability investments.

BTS Investment Advisors, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland and Mumbai, India and YES BANK, the new-age private sector bank, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop sustainable finance and investment in India. Under this mandate, BTS and YES Bank will focus on developing market opportunities for sustainable investments and value added services that increasingly incorporate principles of sustainability, corporate social responsibility (CSR), ethics and accountability in financial models and business investment decision making. “The sustainable finance niche in India represents a hitherto untapped, yet potentially tremendously rewarding opportunity and the time is right to build Socially Responsible and Sustainable Investing. With a strong partner like YES Bank, BTS looks forward to creating new benchmarks and best practice in sustainable finance and investment”, said Alois Flatz, Managing Partner of BTS. Describing this as a significant milestone in establishing YES Bank, Rana Kapoor, CEO of YES Bank added, “We consider sustainable finance and investment to be a sunrise sector for India which will increasingly become mainstreamed into the portfolio of banking services.”

BTS is a key financial services provider for the Indian sub-continent. It provides advice both for investments into the Indian stock markets, and also for foreign direct investments (FDI) into Indian companies in order to promote their global businesses and expansion plans. The shareholders of BTS are the Guggenbühl family, Alois Flatz, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (seco) of the Swiss Government and Volkart Holding AG, one of Switzerland’s oldest trading companies. BTS manages funds over US$ 200 million, invested in listed and non-listed securities in India. BTS’s dedicated and highly experienced investment team provides investment advisory services from its offices in Zurich and Mumbai.

Since 2000, BTS has been the exclusive investment advisor for the Swiss Technology Venture Capital Fund, a private equity fund dedicated to expansion finance in India and funded by the Swiss Government. Today, the SwissTec fund, one of the early entrants in the Indian Private Equity market, has a leading position in the sector, with a proven track record for small- and mid-cap investments. The fund has been successfully investing in well managed and fast growing companies across diverse sectors in India. BTS has started to divest the fund’s investments achieving annual investment returns of 20% to 26% for the first four divestments.

Encouraged by this success and investor interest, BTS group is currently offering a successor fund called BTS India Private Equity Fund Limited to institutions and private investors . This new fund will be launched in the second Quarter of 2005 and is open for subscriptions. Encouraged by the superior performance of the SwissTec fund, the Swiss Government will again be a key investor in the new fund.

For further information please contact:

Alois Flatz
Managing Partner
Zürich, Switzerland Mumbai, India
Phone: +41 44 289 90 50 Phone: +91 (22) 5697 8292
Email: alois@btsia.com
www.btsadvisors.com

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BTS Investment Advisors offers private and public equity investment services, financial advice for cross-border activities between India and Europe and structuring proprietary funds and investment opportunities. BTS was established in 1996 by Alastair Guggenbühl-Even, a longtime consultant in the financial industry, and employs an international team consisting of seven financial professionals in India and Switzerland. One of the major activities of the group is advising the Swiss Technology Venture Capital Fund, a private equity fund initiated by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (seco) of the Swiss Government. BTS hold over USD 200 million assets under management.

YES BANK, the new age private sector bank, has commenced operations from its Nehru Centre Corporate Headquarters in Mumbai, and aspires to be a leading financial player with a focused approach. It plans to gradually target wholesale banking, financial markets, corporate and transactional banking, retail and private banking business lines across the country. An outcome of the professional commitment of its Indian promoters, Mr. Ashok Kapur and Mr. Rana Kapoor, to establish a high quality, technology driven, state-of-the-art private Indian Bank catering to “EMERGING INDIA”. Rabobank, Netherlands, a part of the Rabobank Group, which is the only ‘AAA’ rated private bank in the world, has 20% of YES BANK’s financial ownership while three other high quality institutional private equity investors - CVC-Citigroup-New York, AIF Capital-Hong Kong, and ChrysCapital-San Francisco have  25% collective ownership.

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