Diverse Marine Launch UK First Finance & Lease Programme

Over the last 24 months, Diverse Marine has witnessed the pressures that our clients and vessel owners are under and the difficulties they face justifying builds in the UK, with conventional vessel procurement methods uncompetitive against yards in Europe, Scandinavia and the Far East - who can offer procurement terms without the need for stage payments through the construction phase.

The solution was to find a mechanism whereby the shipyard funds the construction of the vessels giving the owner/operator the ability to “collect” the vessel on completion through term finance or long term lease options.  

Diverse Marine has listened and can now offer this with immediate effect through the Diverse Marine Client Finance Programme. Financing for an initial, but rolling, eight vessels has been allocated, with the first vessels already in build for delivery in 2024.

With the UK Government targeting 50GW of installed offshore wind capacity by 2030 from the current 15GW and European member states targeting a collective 111GW offshore wind capacity by 2023, the European and UK supply chain needs to provide solutions as to how this can be achieved. 

Funding for offshore wind CTV’s has been challenging and the Diverse Marine Client Finance Programme aims to ease and overcome the challenges to ownership and operation of crew transfer vessels.

Peter Curtis, an independent marine finance consultant, has been instrumental in setting up the new programme for Diverse Marine and continues to play a vital role in the day to day running and liaison with clients as Customer Finance Director.

Ben Colman, Director of Diverse Marine: “The introduction of this in-house programme is the result of over 12 months of discussions with funders after listening to the needs of our clients.  For UK yards to remain globally competitive, the need to talk monthly lease figures or monthly repayment figures has become more critical than capital purchase costs.  The scheme is unique in how it is set up and unique in terms of the finance solution that we can offer our clients”.

Peter Curtis, Customer Finance Director adds: “The financing of CTV’s with Diverse Marine fulfils decades of ambition with UK operators and UK shipyards and to finally be able to launch this programme is very exciting for the industry.”

Diverse Marine would like to acknowledge the considerable effort that has been put into the programme to date from Graeme Laing of LCM Partners, their legal team at Ernst & Young LLP and Diverse Marine’s own legal team at Stephenson Harwood LLP.