Investment Associate Principal

Investment Associate Principals (IAPs) lead or support every stage of the SME investment process. This particular opportunity sits within one of our SME development funds, which invests across a range of ticket sizes and instruments. Investment focus areas include:

· Debt and mezz/hybrid structures in financial-services supply chains; and

· VC-stage and growth-stage equity investments in innovation-led and impact-aligned businesses

Significant activities include originating and screening transactions, evaluating investment opportunities, managing due diligence, structuring and negotiating equity, debt and mezzanine transactions, and supporting post-investment management to work with portfolio companies to drive value creation and value-accretive exits – with some senior support.

Highly successful IAPs execute fundamental investment analysis, apply sound business judgment, engage credibly with senior stakeholders (e.g. IC members and investors/ LPs), and manage complex, fast-moving processes. They are self-starters, feel a strong sense of ownership of their work and have excellent team, leadership and interpersonal skills.

Key Responsibilities

Deal origination

• Build and maintain a network of deal sources within investor/LP's supply chains and the SME ecosystem that regularly introduce high-quality, mandate-aligned opportunities into the fund’s pipeline.

Deal evaluation

• Manage a pipeline of potential investments at different stages of the screening process and support team members in managing their pipelines.
• Direct team members in crafting high level investment theses and, together with financial evaluation and investment structuring, motivate transactions to the rest of the deal team. Build strong relationships with Founders of early-stage companies

Project management

• Executing all of the above within a strongly project managed work process is essential.

Investment process improvement

• Embrace the ethos of continual improvement in identifying and driving initiatives to enhance or re-engineer existing processes to increase efficiency in the deal-making process.

Deal execution

• Due diligence:
• Plan and execute commercial and financial due diligences with multiple workstreams
• Undertake focused research and analysis as part of the due diligence process to understand the growth potential of a small business
• Analyse historical financials and conduct financial modelling and valuation to structure equity, debt or combined instruments
• Review team outputs and prepare high quality investment reports
• Build strong rapport with the Investment Committee and successfully present investment opportunities to them

• Closing: Managing the process of:

• Drafting, negotiation and execution of legal agreements ensuring they accurately reflect the approved term sheet
• Effective transaction hand-over process and on-going collaboration with PIM and GS (Growth Support) teams
• Governance and record keeping leveraging team member support

Teambuilding

• Develop Investment Associates and Analysts through coaching, mentoring and training on technical topics

Requirements

Qualifications

• At least a graduate degree, preferably with a technical and / or quantitative emphasis (finance, engineering, accounting, law, etc)
• An MBA, CA(SA), CAIA or CFA degree would be advantageous

Experience

• 5+ years across the full deal lifecycle, spanning equity and debt investing in SMEs (origination through to exit, recovery or write-off), or in Tier 1 corporate finance / business consulting with balanced strategy and operations exposure.
• Other experience, especially within impact VC / PE, development finance or development finance will add significant weight to the application.