February 7th, 2008 12:59 GMT

Published in WEEKLY

“They let me create more or less my dream bank in shipping,” said DVB’s shipping boss Dagfinn Lunde.

“We offer only secured loans, together with equity, and we do all sorts of structures and advisory work,” he said. “But it is built on real expertise.”

Lunde says one of his first moves was to employ Riaz Khan, previously based in Switzerland running his own company, Marinav Shipping&Trading (MST), and who now heads DVB’s Research&Strategic Planning (Rasp) division.

Lunde, after being away from the sharp end of shipping for a time, says he needed someone who knew and could follow the market to advise him.

“Rasp has served us extremely well and created the research base orientation whereby loan evaluation, investment evaluation and strategies are developed,” said Lunde. “We have a similar group for aviation and this has permeated through the bank. It is a very knowledge-based structure.”

Since 1 January 2008, DVB Bank’s shipping division has been reorganised along 10 shipping sector lines to have a global view of each market. It has built on the success of three existing specialist groups introduced for the financing of container boxes (in 2003), cruiseships (2005) and floating, production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessels (2006), the bank’s most profitable units.

DVB claims to be pioneering this type of shipping finance structure in banking but its roots can be traced back to Lunde’s realisation that greater sector expertise was needed when sitting down with customers rather than, for example, its Greek office only looking after Greeks. “Other banks have adopted similar strategies, but not really across the board,” said the shipping division chief.

It has meant hiring in again after a period without replacing staff, including a team from ING.