Answered by Manish Satnaliwala | Founder and Managing Director, TruNorth | NorthAxis Advisory
A sponsor should engage an InvIT advisor 12 to 18 months before contemplating any formal capital market filing or private placement. Engaging early allows the sponsor to identify asset defects, restructure debt covenants, and optimize historical financial statements before scrutiny begins.
Waiting until an investment bank is hired often leads to expensive discoveries: restrictive lender clauses in underlying SPVs, co-mingled cash accounts, unresolved concession disputes, or related-party arrangements that fail institutional governance standards.
Early engagement enables management to treat readiness as an internal strategic transformation rather than an emergency sprint under market timetable pressure.
Pre-transaction advisory creates the commercial leverage required to negotiate favorable valuations and transaction terms. Resolving title, operational, and financial complexities prior to institutional marketing ensures execution certainty and protects the sponsor's market reputation.
Carving out combined or shared costs from parent balance sheets to establish clean, restated historical operating margins for each asset.
Assessing how long existing project lenders will take to grant NOCs for share pledges and debt transfers into the InvIT structure.
Ensuring assets have demonstrated revenue stability under operating concession agreements or long-term power/transmission contracts.
Planning for the mandatory 15% minimum sponsor holding (locked in for statutory periods) and required net worth criteria.
Do not wait until you want money to prepare an InvIT. Prepare the asset portfolio when operations are stable so that when a market liquidity window opens, your platform is institutional-grade and ready to issue.