Barak’s experience and knowledge in short-term African markets has allowed the deal origination team to build a complete pipeline of investments to meet growing investor demand.
What matters is the size of the fund in relation to its mandate or investment style. Trade Finance Funds worldwide operate in a unique investment space, and Manager Discretion is key to managing the size that a Fund can grow to. As Trade Finance Funds grow, so do the underlying deal sizes. This natural progression has seen Barak’s ability to get deals out of the door take slightly longer.
Large investor flows, which occurred throughout 2017, has enhanced Barak’s global investor presence and certainly emphasised the Fund’s profile of being the leading alternative short-term financer in Africa. At the same time however, pressure to ensure there is a growing deal pipeline to meet large capital inflows is of paramount importance. As at the start of H2 2018, the Fund is fully deployed with a strong pipeline for disbursement.
The STF Fund will only begin accepting new inflows depending on the deployment of STF deals and ultimately addressing Fund capacity for the strategy. Barak see the Fund’s ultimate capacity reaching the USD 1 billion mark, with the focus to ensure investors continue to receive the adequate risk-adjusted net returns for the appropriate Africa risk.
The Fund Manager has started the process of implementing an investor queuing system, which will take into account all committed inflows received from interested parties. This queuing system is to ensure a fair allocation policy between investors into the STF Fund.
A fair and calculated investor queuing system takes two aspects into account; when a commitment was made, and if the commitment was made from a current or prospective investor.