Legal team size: 30 across Legal, Audit, Risk and Compliance

What are the most significant cases and transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

In Q1 2024, we closed local currency facilities in Nigeria and Ghana. The facilities were led by Standard Bank, with A&O Shearman representing lenders. In Q2 2024, we also amended and upsized our East African facilities, welcoming the US Development Finance Corporation as a new lender for USD$ 51 m.

For equity, in 2023 we finalised our USD$ 85 m raise of convertible notes with participating investors including Sumitomo and SBI Holdings, amongst others.

We also began scaling up our electric mobility business in Kenya as a stand-alone subsidiary and raising equity and debt capital specifically for this group.

We launched in South Africa and became a licensed credit provider under the National Credit Regulations.

For new products, we have submitted our applications to become a licensed cash loan provider in each of Nigeria and Ghana, with applications nearly final in each of those jurisdictions (I would treat this as confidential for now given they have not been approved).

Which recent political, economic or regulatory changes have impacted your work the most in the past year?

In Kenya following the passage of the Digital Credit Regulations, we successfully became a licensed digital credit provider. This required us to set up a new regulated entity to conduct our licensed business, establish appropriate intercompany relationships and ensure compliance with all CBK regulations and reporting requirements.

We have experienced challenging macroeconomic environments in many of our markets including foreign exchange depreciation particularly in Nigeria and Kenya in H1 2024 (although Kenya experienced a significant bounce back in Q2), inflationary pressures on food and other everyday essentials especially in Kenya which caused pressure on our customers’ earnings, floods in Kenya which wreaked across the nation and political uncertainty over the last year with elections in Nigeria and South Africa and most recently in Kenya with respect to protests over the Finance Bill, 2024.

As the leader of our compliance and health and safety teams we spend a lot of time ensuring the health, safety and wellbeing of our staff and sales agents during periods of unrest and uncertainty.

My risk team maintains our corporate risk register and runs our Management Risk Committee meetings, reporting into the Risk committee of our board of directors. We continually seek to identify, evaluate, analyse and treat risks. We have established a risk champion programme to help embed a strong risk culture throughout our company. We also onboarded a third-party Governance, Risk and Compliance platform to monitor and report operational and IT risk and manage third parties and our data privacy programme.

Are there any causes, business or otherwise, that you are passionate about?

Access to justice and the rule of law. I am a founding member of the Gail African advisory board which seeks to increase the global impact community of lawyers in the global south and support on a ‘just transition’ towards renewable and regenerative economies. I have also been active in setting up Kenya first pro bono clearing house in Kenya.