About the position
Job Purpose
The purpose of the Senior Investment Officer role is to generate deal flow and build a strong pipeline of prospective projects for development financing. This role is also responsible for structuring deals, as well as appraising, negotiating, and closing Project Finance, Corporate Finance, or Structured Finance transactions.
Key Performance areas
Investment and Loan Transactions
- Originate, identify, structure and execute infrastructure investment opportunities in key strategic sectors/investment themes.
- Perform detailed analysis of investment opportunities, including commercial analysis, financial modelling and risk and institutional analysis.
- Negotiate and review transaction agreements (including finance agreements) and project documents.
- Facilitate deal closure by taking responsibility for optimal financial, institutional and legal structuring.
- Provide innovative and flexible financial structures for complex transactions.
- Prepare Investment Committee and Board papers on investment opportunities for consideration by management and committees (including the Board).
- Manage relationships at various levels with the relevant project stakeholders, partners, and lead promoters, in accordance with the project's development objectives.
- Identify and report growth opportunities to enhance market presence and implement structured and targeted marketing strategies to promote services.
Transaction Execution and Credit Approval
- Collaborate with the Treasury, Legal, and Loan Administration teams to structure and negotiate detailed term sheets, ensuring transaction approval.
- Secure internal approvals and lead or participate actively in closing transactions through successful negotiations.
- Manage the credit approval process from early review to final decision by the relevant committees.
- Review proposals submitted to approval committees to ensure they are well-structured and documented for informed decision-making.
- Resolve potential constraints in the lending value chain in collaboration with the Head of Transacting.
- Implement risk management procedures across continent-wide financing functions, ensuring investment risks are appropriately structured and mitigated during operations.
- Capture and apply learning opportunities post-transaction to drive continuous improvement and successful deal delivery.
Relationship Management and Business Development
- Build and maintain strong relationships with clients, global and regional private businesses, banking and multilateral partners and government officials to further develop specific investment opportunities.
- Undertake business development in South Africa and the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa and position DBSA as the preferred lender/investor/partner.
- Ensure continuous communication with DBSA-funded project clients to support the division's monitoring function.
- Undertake other tasks as assigned by the line manager, from time to time.
QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE
Minimum Requirements
- A postgraduate qualification or equivalent in Business (such as an MBA) or Finance (CA or CFA), or Engineering, or Economics or Actuarial Science.
- A minimum of 8 years' experience in appraising, negotiating and closing project finance, corporate finance, or structured finance transactions in a financial institution.
- Experience in working on investment projects through an established approval process.
- Experience in successful investment, appraisal, analysis and implementation is required.
- Experience in executing infrastructure transactions in Africa is a requirement.
- Demonstrable track record of originating, structuring and closing infrastructure transactions.
- Understanding of the types of agreements/contracts typically used in corporate finance and/or limited recourse project finance.
- Demonstrated ability to structure a variety of complex financial instruments (debt and equity) and analyse financial models.
- Capacity to deal with conflicting priorities and deliver high-quality work on schedule; ability to work successfully in multicultural teams and across boundaries.
- Commitment to ethical standards and to sustainable development with sensitivity to social and environmental challenges.
- Outstanding interpersonal, diplomatic and partnership skills required for building and maintaining collaborative relationships with key stakeholders.
COMPETENCIES
Customer Service Orientation
- Tries to understand the underlying needs of customers and matches these needs to available or customised products and services.
- Adapts processes and procedures to meet ongoing customer needs.
- Utilises the feedback received by customers to develop new and/or improve existing services/ products that relate to their ongoing needs.
- Thinks of new ways to align DBSA's offerings with future customer needs.
Integrity
- Acts consistent with basic values of openness and honesty.
- Acts consistent with values and beliefs.
- Acts on values when it is not easy to do so.
- Acts on values when a significant cost or risk is associated with doing so.
Self-awareness and Self Control
- Withholds effects of strong emotions in difficult situations.
- Keeps functioning or responds constructively despite stress.
- May apply special techniques or plan ahead of time to manage emotions or stress.
Achievement Orientation
- Undertakes challenging assignments and strives to complete them.
- Sets priorities and chooses goals based on calculated costs, anticipated benefits and
- improvement of performance.
- Aims at exceptional performance; setting out to achieve a unique standard.
- Constantly analyses outcomes to ensure the achievement of business goals.
- Identifies short-term opportunities or potential problems, aiming to achieve better outcomes.
Analytical Thinking
- Identifies multiple elements of a problem and breaks down each of those elements in detail, showing causal relationships between them.
- Uses several analytical techniques to identify several solutions and weighs the value of each.
Conceptual thinking
- Creates new concepts that are not obvious to others and not learned from previous education or experience to explain situations or resolve problems.
- Looks at things in a significantly novel way, breakthrough thinking.
Strategic and Innovative thinking
- Experiments with new approaches, tests scenarios, questions assumptions and challenges conventional thinking.
- Creates new concepts that are not obvious to others, leveraging internal and external sources of information, to build incremental revenue and growth opportunities.
- Recognises opportunities or problems emerging in patterns and trends, and their impact on the business and profitability drivers.
- Applies learning from previous situations and experiences.
- Sees underlying causality in the current situation. Applies business acumen to make sound decisions.
- Recognises opportunities or potential problems, before they become obvious, by seeing the connections in a range of sources of information, including insights from outside DBSA.
- Restates complex knowledge in a way that makes it easier for others to understand.
Commercial Business Acumen
- Understands business fundamentals.
- Analyses and comprehends organisational goals and strategies.
- Understands tactical business fundamentals in the public sector environment and incorporates them into decision-making.
Driving delivery of results
- Sets challenging goals that will have a significant impact on the business or support the organisational strategy.
- Commits significant resources and/or time to ensure that challenging goals are achieved, while also taking action to mitigate risk.
Teamwork
- Acts to promote a friendly climate and good morale and resolves conflicts.
- Creates opportunities for cross-functional working.
- Encourages others to network outside of their own team/department and learn from their experience.
TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES
Project Management
- Defines, plans, and manages large and/or strategic projects, including those with a high degree of technical complexity, with impacts across the organisation and/or with national implications.
Desired Skills:
Desired Work Experience:
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