Hello Richard, can you briefly say what is special about BlueOrchard’s investment platform?
Plugging into the BlueOrchard platform gives all the investment teams a market leading footprint in frontier and emerging markets. Our regional teams are tapped into the financial services sector in their respective regions giving them access to real time market intelligence coupled with a deep level of market understanding.
They have access to industry executives, advisors, regulators, and other industry stakeholders which gives them a unique perspective of the operating environments in the countries which we operate in.
How does the global aspect come into play?
Our global reach gives us a unique advantage when it comes to allocating capital. We’re able to benchmark companies, countries, and regions on a global basis. Our various teams actively track large datasets across all the relevant regions on a monthly basis which effectively turns our internal tracking tool into a global financial inclusion dashboard.
This allows our teams and committees to make well informed capital allocation decisions at a global level based on hard data.
How do you leverage this when working with your partner companies?
I would say that our global reach also allows us to partner with our investee companies much more effectively in growing their businesses. While all regions and countries are unique, with their own challenges and opportunities, there are also a lot of commonalities in financial services across frontier and emerging markets. Understanding the challenges faced in scaling a particular product in rural India may provide useful learnings to a team looking to do something similar in Ghana or Brazil.
These two aspects together put our private equity team in the unique position of being able to leverage 20 years of institutional know how across 60 countries.
Thank you Richard!