World Bank attracts $112B in private capital, a 62% increase under Banga’s overhaul

The World Bank Group pulled in roughly $69 billion in private capital during fiscal year 2025, up from $47 billion the year before. That 47% jump in direct mobilization is part of a broader story: when you count all private capital the institution helped enable, the number climbs to about $161.7 billion, with the World Bank’s core lending arms responsible for $100.2 billion of that figure, or about 62%.

President Ajay Banga, who took the helm in June 2023, has been methodically retooling the 80-year-old institution into something that looks less like a traditional aid bank and more like a deal-structuring platform for institutional money.

The securitization playbook

The centerpiece of the new strategy is an “originate-to-distribute” model. Instead of making loans and holding them on the balance sheet forever, the World Bank’s private-sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), packages those loans into securities and sells them to outside investors.

IFC put this into practice with its first-ever collateralized loan obligation (CLO), closing a $510 million deal in September 2025 that bundled loans from 57 borrowers across developing economies.

Every dollar the IFC recycles off its balance sheet through securitization is a dollar it can redeploy into new projects. Banga’s team is targeting $20 billion in annual guarantee issuance by 2030. Alongside the CLO program, the institution has launched a new guarantees platform and a Private Sector Investment Lab, both designed to reduce the perceived risk of investing in frontier markets.

Five years, half a trillion dollars

Zoom out to the five-year window ending in mid-2025, and the cumulative financing picture gets large quickly. Total financing over that period lands somewhere in the range of $524.5 billion to $560 billion, with private capital mobilization contributing roughly $200 billion of that sum.

For institutional investors, the key question is execution risk. Securitizing loans across dozens of borrowers in developing economies introduces complexity around currency risk, political risk, and recovery rates that differ sharply from the corporate CLO market. The $510 million IFC deal is a proof of concept, not yet proof of scalability.

The $20 billion annual guarantee target by 2030 would require the World Bank to roughly quadruple its current guarantee activity in five years, while maintaining the credit quality that lets its bonds trade at near-sovereign spreads.