After studying in Italy and France while still an undergraduate, Babanoury was working as a legal assistant at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton when she accepted a post with the firm's Prague office. "I had been working non-stop, so it didn't really hit me what I had agreed to do until I was on the plane on the way to Prague," she said.

Roya Babanoury '92

  

During a year there working on a deal to build an international terminal at the Czech airport, she learned about project finance, which structures long-term loans that use the assets of a project as collateral for the lenders and the revenues from the project to repay the loan.

As often is the case in international business, local customs and quirks had to be mastered to get the job done. "I learned on the job that if you wanted to learn cash flow or historical revenues or anything," she said, "you had to go to the economics department with a bottle of wine or some kind of offering."
 

After the year working abroad, Babanoury returned to the States to attend the University of Michigan Law School. In the summertime she studied international law at the Sorbonne in Paris and worked in Washington D.C. at the International Finance Corporation, an affiliate of the World Bank that finances projects in underdeveloped countries.
 

"I like the idea behind project finance, that something tangible is produced," she said. "A lot of times you're privatizing industries and making them more efficient, or building a road or a bridge or providing electricity to people."
 

The head of the global project finance department approached Babanoury at a cocktail party while she was a summer associate in 1996. "Do you like to travel?" he asked her. "And do you have a passport?" In five days she was in Tokyo working on financing a power plant in Thailand.