Emerging Markets
Jersey Finance Trumpets South Africa's Capital-Raising Potential
The IFC has supported a new report about South Africa's potential for capital raising, showing how financial hubs such as Jersey are looking at the country, and other parts of Africa, as promising new markets.
Jersey is pushing its case as an international financial centre serving jurisdictions in South Africa, saying in a new research report that capital-raising potential for the country is “substantial”.
The report is called South African Fund Managers: Trends in Fund Domiciliation and Capital Raising, and produced by African Business magazine. It was highlighted in a webinar yesterday held by Jersey Finance.
“We are in no doubt that there is a huge opportunity for Jersey in South Africa. Investors want a jurisdiction with political and fiscal stability, with a no-change outlook from a regulatory, legal or economic perspective – and Jersey ticks these boxes,” Elliot Refson, head of funds at Jersey Finance, said.
IFCs such as Jersey must push their financial expertise into investments, alongside private and institutional investors, gaining support from Development Finance Institutions (DFIs).
The report’s authors surveyed more than 60 C-suite or partner-level executives, investors and fund managers operating in jurisdictions worldwide with a connection to South African managers. The objective was to explore the emerging global trends in fund domiciliation and capital-raising, particularly as a route for private equity impact investing into the wider African continent.
“The shifting geopolitics introduced by Brexit, Trumpism and now, also COVID-19 is reconfiguring Africa’s place in the world and driving its rapid ascendency. One important consequence is that Brexit and Trumpism have brought home some inconvenient truths that political risk is not idiosyncratic to Africa and so-called ‘emerging markets’ but rather, that they are features of markets everywhere,” Dr Desné Masie, author of the report, chief strategist at IC Intelligence, and editorial director at African Business magazine, said.
Allan Wood, global head of business development at Jersey Finance, said: “This research follows on from our 2015 report, Jersey’s Value to Africa, where the opportunities to facilitate capital flows into the continent were explored at a macro level.”