Bankrolling the movie business

Banking isn’t usually considered a sexy business. Movies and television, most people would say, are sexy industries.

So you might say Lee Beasley is a lucky banker, as head of media and entertainment client relationships for Standard Chartered, he is basically a banker for the stars, and so therefore, by proxy, he’s involved in a sexy industry.

Except the nitty gritty isn’t all that exciting after all – essentially he offers a variant of receivables financing for movies – and yet, it’s a new and growing industry in Asia. Standard Chartered bills itself as the first bank in the region to have set up a creative industries group based in Hong Kong that helps finance cinemas and broadcasters and offers “content financing”. In simple terms, that’s providing the money to help produce a film.

The group covers not just Hong Kong and China, but also Singapore and India. Hitherto, the main competition was from banks whose offices in Los Angeles, New York and London were handling financing for movies produced in Hong Kong or China. And of course, in India, the competition comes from local financiers.

For now, the bank is largely focused on China. Its debut project was Curse of the Golden Flower, a Hong Kong movie produced by Bill Kong, directed by Zhang Yimou (who is the director of the Beijing Olympics opening and closing ceremonies) and that starred Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li. Last year, it was the Mainland’s largest grossing film at the box office and, as expected, the bank has been repaid for its financing efforts (Standard Chartered declines to say how much it financed).

It is currently financing the $70 million Battle of Red Cliff. This John Woo directed film is based on the Chinese historical classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms and stars Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro. Aside from big names and big bucks, it also has another key drawing card; its investors are all from Asia.