Investment Officer: Municipalities

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.

Key Responsibilities

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.

Expertise & Technical Competencies

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.

Required Personal Attributes

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.