Alan J. Beard
Geothermal Development Facility for Latin America (GDF)
Managing Director
Mr. Alan J. Beard has almost 40 years of international finance and business development experience. He currently leads Interlink Capital Strategies (www.interlinkdc.com), a management-consulting and private equity firm based in Washington, DC focusing on business development and financing in emerging markets. (The former COO of ExIm Bank and former CEO of OPIC have been part of the management team.) He has personally led several structured/project financings in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East ranging in size from a few million dollars to over a billion euros using government risk mitigation from North America, Europe and Asia. He has worked with many financial institutions and banks in the U.S. to service the international needs of their customers, including assisting OPIC (the predecessor of the U.S. Development Finance Corporation) to create a public/private initiative focusing on improving the delivery of loans for small to medium sized business. He has established a number of Development Finance Institution (DFI’s) backed private equity funds, most recently co-founding three funds: ExWorks Capital and FDI Capital, both specialty commercial finance companies, which are approved ExIm Bank lenders, as well as a DFI supported fund that invests in early-stage geothermal power development in Latin America backed by Germany’s Export Credit Agency (KfW) and the European Union (www.gdflac.com). He has also served as a member of the U.S. Secretary of Commerce’s Trade Finance Advisory Council, where he headed up an initiative to better train public sector officials in the use of trade finance solutions.
Previously, Mr. Beard and another partner grew a consulting firm which arranged several billion dollars in government grants, equity, guarantees and loans from around the world for more than 700 companies and sold it to what is now JP Morgan Chase where he became the head of merchant banking. He served as an official in both ExIm Bank and the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration. He has been an adjunct professor at Georgetown University for undergraduate and graduate international business courses. (Through Interlink, he sponsors the annual international business scholar award for the McDonough School of Business.) He has edited and contributed to the writing of more than 20 books and is a frequent speaker on international finance issues. More recently, he co-authored and edited Trade Finance Handbook, Inside the World’s Export Credit Agencies, Inside the World’s Development Finance Institutions, and Terrorism & Personal Security, all published by Thomson Publishing. Mr. Beard graduated from the University of Utah cum laude and received his MBA from The George Washington University.