Closing a Private Debt Transaction in Africa

Closing a Private Debt Transaction in Africa: What the Work Actually Looks Like

Louis Lallia, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Boma Conseil, walks through how a recent private debt mandate came together, and what it reveals about how Boma operates.

1. What did this transaction involve?

A financial institution with over two decades of operations across multiple East and West African markets needed to raise private debt. Our role was to understand the business, structure the transaction, identify the right investors, and get it to closing.

The institution secured the capital it needed on terms that worked for both sides. Investors came in with a clear picture of what they were buying. No late surprises, no last-minute restructuring.

That outcome is not accidental. A cross-border transaction spanning several regulatory environments has a lot of moving parts. Most of what makes it work, or does not, happens well before a term sheet is drafted.

2. How do you approach a mandate like this differently from a typical advisory firm?

The honest answer is that we do not think of ourselves as advisors in the traditional sense. We think like principals, not intermediaries. Our job is not to close a transaction and move on. It is to stand behind what we bring to the table, before, during, and long after closing.

When we take on a mandate, the transaction enters our investment universe. Our clients, the investors we work with repeatedly, trust us not just to bring them opportunities, but to stand behind them. If we put our name on a transaction, we are accountable for what happens after closing, not just before it. That changes how we work from the very first conversation with a borrower.

It also means we are selective. We do not take on every mandate that comes through the door. We take on businesses we are prepared to vouch for to our investor base.

3. What did that look like in practice here?

Before we touched the structure, we spent significant time inside the business. Visiting operations across its various markets. Sitting with the management team. Understanding how credit decisions actually get made at the branch level, not just what the policy manual says.

You can review three years of audited financials and still miss what matters. How does a management team handle stress? What happens when a scheduled repayment is delayed? What does the collections process actually look like on the ground, not on a slide?

There were moments in the due diligence process where what we found on the ground did not match what the documents suggested. Working through those gaps before the transaction was structured, rather than after, is exactly the kind of thing that protects everyone in the end.

That understanding shaped everything downstream. The protections and guarantees we built into the structure were not a checklist exercise. They reflected specific things we had learned about how this business operates, and where the real risks sit versus the apparent ones.

4. What did that mean for the investors who came in?

It meant they were not evaluating a deck. They were evaluating a transaction that had already been stress-tested, across several jurisdictions, in regulatory environments that do not forgive shortcuts.

More importantly, they knew that we had skin in the game beyond the closing fee. The investors in this transaction are clients we work with on an ongoing basis. They know that when Boma brings them something, it is because we have already formed a genuine view on whether the business is worth backing, and we will be accountable to them for that view over the life of the investment, not just at signing.

5. How does that shape the kinds of mandates you take on?

It makes us more demanding at the front end, and more useful to everyone over time.

We will decline mandates where we cannot get close enough to the business to form a genuine view. We will decline mandates where the fundamentals do not hold up under scrutiny, regardless of how attractive the headline numbers look. And we will decline mandates where the fit with our investor base is not right, even if the business itself is sound.

What that means for entrepreneurs and business owners is that when we do take on a mandate, the process is substantive. We are not packaging and distributing. We operate as rigorous corporate finance advisors, conducting deep institutional analysis to validate and stand behind the structural integrity of your business.

And for investors, it means that over time, the pipeline we bring them is curated, not by market size or fee potential, but by what we are genuinely prepared to stand behind.

6. What would you say to someone reading this, either an investor or a business looking for this kind of partner?

Come to us early, before the transaction is fully shaped. The earlier we can get close to a business, the more useful we can be, and the better the outcome for everyone involved.

If you are an investor looking for access to carefully underwritten opportunities in African markets, we should talk. If you are an entrepreneur trying to figure out how to structure a raise and want a partner who will still be at the table two years after closing, we should also talk.

What we are not is a firm that processes transactions from a distance. If you want someone who operates more like a co-investor than a broker, that is what we are.

For investors and entrepreneurs who want a partner willing to do that work, the conversation starts earlier than most people expect. Not at the term sheet. Not at the pitch. At the point where the business is still being understood, and the right structure has not yet been decided. That is where the value is built. Everything else follows.