Financial engineering

It may seem to many a businessman, building up a company, that banks are solely concerned with the figures which appear on that company´s balance sheet at the end of the year ¿ figures which, while providing a useful gauge to measure a company´s progress, are only a snapshot of the company´s financial position at one moment in time. As the following article shows, bankers are not just interested in company balance sheets. They need to understand the conditions in which the company operates, the problems it faces, the quality of the management to weather both fair winds and foul, and, most important of all, to translate the management´s ambitions for their companies into reality by designing the appropriate financial facilities ¿ `financial engineering¿ is no bad description for the role of many bankers today. To bring the interrelationship of business and banker together, this article has been written in the form of a case history. While it is hypothetical ¿ in order to encompass as many of a company´s banking relationships as possible over a period of years ¿ it is based on an amalgam of real-life situations