Corporate Advisory and Investment Management: An Overview of SSC Capital

Salum Awadh, CEO of SSC Capital, presents the company. SSC Capital is a corporate advisory and investment management firm offering solutions in corporate advisory, private equity and venture capital transactions, corporate finance, capital raising, project management, funds management, research, mergers and acquisitions, institutional set-up, debt and corporate restructuring, and investment banking.

“SCC Capital is a corporate advisory and investment management firm. Our focus is actually on three main areas. One is corporate advisory or strategy advisory, where we do the traditional consulting work, from strategic development, we structure companies, we do turnaround deals, research, feasibility studies, market entry strategies, etc. The second line of business is financial services. We are trying to unlock the availability of capital to the market. By doing that, we have a range of services that will cater to early stage startups, businesses up to major corporate. In that area, we have two sub lines of business. One is an equity crowdfunding platform, which is a digital platform that allows businesses to raise money online from a wide range of retail investors globally. In the same area, we are also providing financial services in Islamic finance, which is a new financing model we are introducing to the market. People have been complaining that one of the major hindrances to access finance for SMEs in Tanzania is the lack of interest rates. So, we are introducing alternative forms of finance, which are interest free, but profit sharing and we share with models that we are introducing to the market. The third area is investment management and investment banking. In this area, we have three main focuses. One is M&A where we advise on mergers and acquisitions. We either represent the seller, mandate, or the buyer. This is for multinational companies who are looking to buy companies in Tanzania and in the region or companies here who are trying to sell and looking for buyers. The second area is around capital raising. We raise money particularly for growth companies and mature companies, anything in a ticket size from one million dollars and above. Our work mainly is to look for these deals, structure these deals, then look for investors to match up with these opportunities and do all the preliminary work to make it easy for investors to invest in the area and that space. We work with multinational private equity and venture capital funds that are looking to invest in Africa. The last area of work in investment management or investment banking is asset management. This is the new line of business that we recently launched. We are trying to use technology to disrupt the way that wealth is managed, especially in many African markets. For that reason, we are currently working on a robo advisor app that will allow democratizing investments so that we allow people to sign up and buy different financial products from stocks and bonds in the palm of their hands through a mobile app and on a web based platform that would allow them to access as many markets as possible. In doing all this, while we are doing some of the services, actually, we will branch them out into almost tending alone ventures. We launched an early stage impact investment fund of $10 million. The idea is to get institutional investors to invest into the fund and allow us to invest in early stage businesses in East Africa. We recently also launched a digital deal origination platform, which is an online platform that allows people with projects to sign up and people looking for investors to also sign up and see how we can use artificial intelligence to match these two parties and how we can do more deals. The main challenge in Tanzania is that there is less penetration of investment, especially private equity and venture capital investments, if we compare to the region. For the past five years, more than 55% of all these investments went to Kenya, and Tanzania was less than 12% in terms of value. So, we are trying to see what we can push to make sure that we attract more investments coming into Tanzania. Two years ago, we launched what we call Tanzania Venture Capital Network, which is a platform, not for profit, which seeks to educate in sensitizing, unlocking the market, and telling people that Tanzania is open for business if you want to do your deals here. We also launched the Tanzania Angel Investors Network as a way to mobilize local capital and tap some of the remittances from Tanzanians living in the diaspora and try to allocate part of these remittances for startup financing in Tanzania. On average, Tanzanians living in the diaspora send home half a billion dollars a year. We want to tap that money to early stage businesses which have been struggling in Tanzania”, says Salum Awadh.

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