The purpose of the Investment Officer role is to support the generation of 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 transactions in a Municipal environment.
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.
Product Development
- Conduct market research on financial products, industry benchmarks, and emerging macro- and micro-economic trends to strengthen market competitiveness and inform strategic decision-making.
- Solicit inputs from legal and technical teams to ensure feasibility and compliance, and ensure alignment of products with regulatory and institutional frameworks.
- Provide support in drafting presentations for structured solutions to internal committees and external partners.
Transaction Execution and Credit Approval
- Collaborate with the Treasury, Legal, Credit 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.
Key Measurements of Outputs (The list is not exhaustive)
- Number of transactions that are approved and committed for DBSA funding to municipalities, municipal entities, and water services authorities.
- Quality of signed agreements/mandates.
- Clients and Stakeholders' service rating.
- Number and quality of early review reports (ERR’s) submitted.
- Revenue performance in terms of interest income and fees generated.
- Percentage of the loan book in priority geographies and sectors.
- Annual disbursements, commitments and approvals.
- Management of relationships with new/ existing clients.
Minimum Requirements
- A Bachelor's Degree in Business, Finance or Engineering, Economics, Actuarial Science or related.
Minimum Qualification
- A minimum of 3-5 years’ experience in appraising, negotiating, undertaking due diligence and closing municipal finance, State Owned Enterprises finance, project finance, corporate finance, or structured finance transactions in a financial institution.
- Knowledge of the public sector financial and regulatory environments, including PFMA and MFMA.
- Proven experience in working with Government institutions in South Africa.
- Experience in working on investment projects through an established approval process.
- 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.
- 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.
- Good interpersonal, diplomatic and partnership skills required for building and maintaining collaborative relationships with key stakeholders.
Desirable Requirements
- Experience in securing infrastructure investment deals in the public sector/municipalities.
- Experience in developing new business strategies and opportunities to create a pipeline of development impact projects, ensuring deal flow and bankability.
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.
- Assembles and leads diverse and multi-disciplinary teams, ensuring maximum effective resource utilisation.
- Successfully manages substantial project budgets and reports directly to senior managers on the progress and results of projects.
- Identifies complex issues that need escalation and proposes appropriate corrective actions.
Business Development
- Takes overall lead for proactive business development at the national and international level.
- Initiates, reviews, and interprets competitor environment reviews and takes actions accordingly.
- Formulates and modifies market approaches based on competitor analyses.
- Leads the formulation, development and implementation of the business development strategy to generate new business opportunities in public and private sector delivery of infrastructure.
- Identifies and develops new markets, products and clients.
- Leads the participation and presentation of an organisation at investment conferences and roundtable discussions.
- Coordinates business activities to ensure that investment initiatives are in support of government BEE strategies, broader national and regional economic development strategies.
Solution Focus
- Identifies broad, highly complex problems based on a multitude of factors, many of which are complex and sweeping in nature, difficult to define and often contradictory.
- Creates procedures to articulate the nature of problems and to identify and weigh alternate solutions.
- Evaluates the effectiveness of solutions using approaches tailored to the situation.
Deal Structuring
- Uses credit enhancement techniques to structure deals and optimise pricing in terms of Basel principles.
- Has an in-depth and practical understanding of how to optimise the Capital Structure, collateral package, and debt repayment profile.
- Interrogates financial models, including those with a high degree of complexity, to develop an optimal structure.
- Identifies complex structural issues that need escalation and proposes appropriate bankable structures.
- Demonstrates knowledge of advanced structuring, including the use of derivatives, syndicated loans, synthetic loans, securitisations, inflation-linked debt, credit default swaps and subordinated debt.
- Prepares specialised or tailored reports relating to new innovative instruments, gathers information from a variety of sources, analyse and includes in a report for new product approval committees.
- Compiles comprehensive specialist reports as required for inclusion in credit committee submissions.
Financial Analysis
- Serves as subject matter expert.
- Evaluates and determines fiscal, operational, and service impacts; analyses and evaluates legislation; and implements and evaluates statistical models in their subject areas.
- Demonstrates in-depth technical and administrative knowledge of the rules and regulations in the subject area and can defend analyses, testimony, and recommendations relating to a variety of issues before management and commissions.
Financial Acumen
- Makes sound financial decisions after having analysed their impacts on the organisation, partner agencies, and community.
- Effectively prepares budgetary submissions and forecasts for own department.
- Knows the internal and external factors that impact resource and asset availability.
- Can interpret management account reports in an operational/commercial context and take action as appropriate to maximise revenues and control costs.
Attention to detail
- Quickly identifies relevant and irrelevant information to support accurate decision making.
- Maps out all the logistics and details of a situation to ensure smooth and flawless implementation.
- Consistently identifies all relevant details that are not obvious in complex situations.
- Requires the highest standards for accuracy and quality for their work.
- Establishes processes to ensure accuracy and quality of services delivered by the team.
Negotiation
- Has an appreciation of cultural sensitivities and differences.
- Effectively employs a variety of advanced behavioural/interpersonal competencies to control the negotiation situation.
- Can take the lead in a variety of sensitive negotiation situations requiring high levels of tact and diplomacy.
- Can place a discrete negotiation situation within the context of a broader long-term relationship and is not threatened by conceding ground to protect the longer-term interests of DBSA.
Commercial Awareness
- Deep understanding of commercial drivers and can make decisions based on an assessment of alternatives concerning complex business situations.
- Deep understanding of DBSA economic priorities and how they can be implemented to meet DBSA's strategic objectives.
- Deep understanding of DBSA's core sector role in achieving DBSA's strategic objectives.
- Deep understanding of the need to coordinate efforts with many government entities, the private sector, community groups and individuals to ensure effective implementation of new policies and regulations.
- Takes actions to fit business strategy.
- Assesses and links short-term tasks in the context of long-term business strategies or perspectives.
- Reviews own actions against the organisation's strategic plan; includes the big picture when considering possible opportunities or projects, or thinks about long-term applications of current activities.
- Anticipates possible responses to different initiatives.
- Understands the projected direction of the industry and how changes might impact the organisation.
Research
- Demonstrates expert skill levels in strategic and operational research techniques, including process analysis, modelling, and forecasting.
- Adapts, creates, and designs new research techniques to meet the organisation's requirements.
- Provides specialist coaching and guidance to researchers and other organisation employees.
- Promotes the professional reputation of the organisation by maintaining a respected profile with relevant external organisations and the research community in general.
Communication and Reporting
- Able to communicate complex problems or concepts by making them simple and understandable for others.
- Adapts language to the level of the audience to ensure that the message has a positive impact and is interesting to the audience.
- Is articulate, demonstrates a wide range of vocabulary, and is confident when talking to large/high-level audiences.
- Designs / customises reports to meet user needs.
- Prepares complex or tailored reports, gathers information from a variety of sources, analyses and includes in a report.
- Keeps standard reports under review and proposes improvements to meet user needs.
Presentation Skills
- Knows how to deliver arguments persuasively by employing a range of advanced presentation techniques (e.g., the appropriate use of body language, how to close a presentation so that the audience continues to think about the subject matter, etc.).
- Knows various feedback mechanisms to check levels of audience understanding.
BEHAVIOURAL 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.
