Job description

About the Role

CIM seeks a seasoned investment executive who can join our team in leading the firm’s investment activities in India to successful, rapid scale. The Country Director has two imminent key areas of focus: Investments and Operational Project Management. The Country Director will join our investment team and report to our Partner overseeing CIM’s emerging markets investment team. At the same time, this leadership position will require project planning and management as CIM establishes its long-term presence and begins building its team in India, commensurate with the growth of its investment activities. 

The position will involve frequent travel within India and occasional travel to global CIM office locations. A passion for impact at scale, strong analytical skills, experience managing teams, and comfort with a high degree of autonomy in a collaborative, small but global organization are essential for success in this role. This role will have significant responsibility for determining the road map to success in India, and then ensuring that the firm follows that road map accordingly.

Responsibilities

Investments:

• Develop a pipeline of fintech credit investment opportunities, build a strong sourcing referral network and conduct thorough due diligence and financial analysis on prospective investees.
• Play a leading role in investment negotiations, documentation, and execution. Proactively explore and implement various structuring solutions that fit local market and product needs.
• Proactively construct new investment theses by analyzing and assessing new markets, fintech verticals, and monitoring the competitive and regulatory landscapes in target markets.
• Synthesize findings, develop perspective on companies in an analytical way with limited information, and create detailed investment memos and make recommendations to the global investment team.
• Work closely with the teams in other CIM office locations on investments, investor reporting, risk reporting and technology coordination.
• Lead the monitoring of existing investments with periodic analytical reviews.
• Amplify CIM’s brand, presence, and influence in target markets by deepening CIM’s networks and curating high impact events/workshops, etc.

Operational Project Management:

• Project planning across functions relating to the establishment and set up of CIM’s presence in India.
• Build out a team over time as required by the investment activities of the firm in India. This will involve hiring, managing and coaching members of the local team. This requires a blend of earned respect, experience, a willingness to lead people and a commitment to the organization’s culture.
• Scale and magnify CIM’s presence in India, by building out existing and new partnerships, as well as setting up CIM’s own initiatives. This will require well-articulated processes both on the investment side and also on the operational and administrative side, considering local laws, regulations, competitive forces and other factors facilitating CIM’s presence in India.
• Oversee various investment vehicles in India to optimize CIM’s investment strategy in India, with a particular focus on tax, legal, and regulatory structuring.

Qualifications

Successful candidates for this role should be experienced in both investing and setting up structures, teams and processes. CIM is looking for someone who possesses sufficient investment experience to manage from start to finish complex investment transactions, someone with sufficient credibility to build trust with the team and with partners in the country, and someone with sufficient vision to establish CIM as a strategic long term debt partner in India. Intellectual curiosity is essential.

Particular experience and qualities for the Country Director include:

• Passionate about financial inclusion, relentlessly inquisitive about identifying emerging fintech trends, and constructively obsessed about assessing the best emerging teams and companies.
• 10-15 years of previous work experience, ideally with a background in fintech, debt financing and structuring. Domain knowledge in fintech verticals and business models preferred.
• Excellent financial modeling and structuring skills and experience in negotiating. CFA a plus.
• Comfortable communicating clearly and effectively in team discussions and sharing your own opinion.
• Excited to work in a small, fluid, ambitious, and highly collaborative global team with a high degree of autonomy, self-motivation, and discipline.
• Strong interpersonal skills, collaborative mindset, self-starter, and an exceptional work ethic.
• Experience working in emerging markets.
• Track record of leading rapid growth in investments at an asset management firm.
• Highly organized leader, with a research mindset and a focus on results.
• Detail-oriented, without losing focus on the big picture.
• Comfortable working to highest standards of performance and ethical behavior.
• Committed to building relationships internally and externally in concert with the firm’s core values.