Perspectives
Macquarie Commodities and Global Markets’ (CGM) Branko Pribicevic, Co-Head of Power, Gas, Carbon EMEA-APAC, speaks to Risk.net as part of CGM being awarded Natural Gas/LNG House of the Year at the 2026 Energy Risk Awards.
The following article was reproduced under licence from Energy Risk.
17 June 2026
Over the past four years natural gas markets have experienced not only huge market shocks – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East, for example – but also structural supply shifts. In the second half of 2025, supply growth hit double digits as new North American liquified natural gas (LNG) facilities came online at pace.
In response to these rapidly changing fundamentals, Macquarie, Energy Risk’s 2026 Natural Gas/LNG House of the Year, created tailored hedges and bespoke products to unlock optionality for clients. This included tools to facilitate index-switching to optimise price exposures, as well as option structures to capture value from LNG cancellation rights.
“Many of our clients have both contracts at market price and longer-term formulas in their portfolios. And if they have any sort of flexibility in terms of location, optional volumes or delivery timing, that’s valuable to them,” says Branko Pribicevic, CGM’s Co-Head of Power, Gas, Carbon EMEA-APAC. “But companies are not necessarily set up to trade that flexibility. Physical players often simply look at the market close to delivery, but because we look a year or two, or even three, ahead we have been able to help them unlock additional value by trading around their contractual flexibilities.”
As market volatility has ramped up in response to geopolitical shifts and the conflict in the Middle East, Macquarie has provided clients with unmargined structures to help them avoid large, unexpected margin calls on these transactions. “This is in effect margin finance from a derivatives angle, and it’s [enhanced] by our view on credit exposure and credit appetite,” Pribicevic says. He adds that the firm’s in-house credit expertise is “quite unique and quite critical for us” and the client coverage teams spend a lot of time getting to grips with clients’ specific circumstances in order to support the bank’s credit risk management analysis. “This better helps our clients and it helps our credit risk management team to gain specific insights into our industries.” In turn, this helps Macquarie provide a wider range of more flexible solutions, he adds. In this way, Pribicevic says CGM’s natural gas trading team aims to be an “industry partner”.
We obviously bring our banking capabilities, which means extending credit solutions and funding where clients need it, and offering price risk management. Any good commodities bank can do that. But we combine that with our physicality and understanding of the industry itself.”
Branko Pribicevic
Co-Head of Power, Gas, Carbon, EMEA-APAC
Commodities and Global Markets
In 2025, Macquarie signalled its long-term commitment to being an industry partner by signing a 20-year LNG offtake agreement with Texas LNG and a 15-year deal with AMIGO LNG, two new terminals being developed to ship US gas to Asian markets. “This is a very good example of us expressing that we are in the same market, that we can help the clients not only with credit and funding, but also have physical capabilities – to be a trading partner and help them reshape contracts, be it with time swaps, location swaps or whatever they need on the physical side, as well as on the financial side,” Pribicevic says.
Having long-term infrastructure contracts in the US enables Macquarie to connect global markets and balance supply needs across regions. This has been particularly useful since the effective closure in late February 2026 of the Strait of Hormuz, a key supply route for nearly a fifth of global LNG trade.1 “If needed, we can be very flexible compared to the other off-takers with their own gas needs,” says Pribicevic. “We can allocate [these supplies] wherever our clients need them most.”
Such flexibility and long-term commitment will be key to continuing to navigate the significant natural gas supply shift that’s forecast in the coming months and years amid growing global demand for energy.
Macquarie Group was Natural Gas/LNG House of the Year at the 2026 Energy Risk Awards.
