Since 2000, Columbia has provided financial advisory services on more than $11.5 billion of bonds including fixed and variable rate, new money and refunding, in areas including general obligation, revenue, annual appropriation, education, transportation, toll/turnpike, mass transit, parking, housing, pension, unemployment, and water utilities. In addition, Columbia has advised on various derivative products including floating-to-fixed rate swaps, forward starting swaps and interest rate locks. Among its clients, Columbia serves as financial advisor to a number of major local and regional issuers, including the Kansas Development Finance Authority, the Kansas Turnpike Authority, the City of Topeka, the City of De Soto, the City of Kansas City, Missouri, the State of Missouri, the Missouri Housing Development Commission, and the City of St. Louis.

Breadth and Depth of Experience

Columbia has advised a wide variety of issuers, from a small, struggling village on the south side of Chicago to a major state government with a gold-plated credit rating. While our approach to each assignment is tailored to the needs of each individual issuer, there are a number of fundamental values running through each of our engagements:

  • We provide advice that is straightforward, independent, and strategic
  • We add value to every engagement through creative problem solving, thorough review of documents, strength of analysis and/or our breadth of experience
  • We bring the full measure of our firm's resources--people, technology, knowledge--to every engagement

Practice Areas

Columbia Capital has the expertise to advise on a wide array of financing types and structures. Among others, our practice includes:

  • General municipal credits (GO, annual appropriation, sales tax, utility revenue)
  • Housing credits (single-family, multi-family, capital grant securitization, layered finance)
  • Urban infrastructure credits (parking facilities, multiuse facilities, redevelopment)
  • Transportation credits (toll road, highways, mass transit)
  • Specialty revenue credits (unemployment, tobacco, pension obligation)
  • Higher education credits (student fee, quasi-university corporation, housing system)
  • Development finance credits (TIF, improvement districts, TDD)
  • Derivative transactions (swaps, interest rate locks)

Approach

The breadth and depth of our team's professional experience are important contributors to our success in providing high-quality advice to our clients. With backgrounds in investment banking, law, public works administration, government administration, corporate trust and economics, Columbia's staff team brings a multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving and teamwork.

Because of the foundational strength of its staff team, Columbia maintains a very broad financial advisory practice. From our work in the complex world of affordable housing credits (where Columbia is a national leader) to our advice on unusual revenue credits--pension obligation, unemployment and tobacco, for instance--we have met and exceeded the expectations of our clients.

Unlike many large advisory firms that function as loose affiliations of geographically-distributed offices, Columbia works as one entity: our clients benefit from the full, collective strength of our abilities.

Columbia takes a holistic approach to its advisory work. We believe that by understanding our clients' needs and constraints more clearly, we can provide better, more informed advice. Columbia appreciates the opportunity to be involved in our clients' financial planning processes--budget development, capital improvement program development, debt policy development--to form a foundation for our understanding of our clients' financial constraints.

With a specific debt program in mind, Columbia participates in the development of a conceptual financing plan--overall structure (level debt, level coverage), planned debt issuance, interest rate mode (fixed, variable, synthetic fixed, synthetic variable), final maturity, pay-as-you-go vs. debt financed capital--and then uses that framework to guide its development of a specific plan of finance for each transaction.

Columbia works closely with its clients' internal and transaction legal counsel to develop legal documents that deliver the business deal desired by the client. We develop and manage a transaction calendar. We work with the lead managing underwriter on negotiated transactions to outline the specific terms and conditions of the sale; in a competitive transaction we develop the Notice of Sale for the same purpose. Before, during and after the scale, we keep our clients abreast of changing market conditions, measures of market competitiveness (spreads to the Municipal Market Data index, for instance), and market interest in the bonds.

Finally, we guide the transaction toward successful closing and prepare a comprehensive post-sale analysis to improve our business intelligence for future issues.

Case Studies

For some illustrations of how Columbia Capital makes a difference for its clients, click here.