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Franklin Olakunle Amoo is a co-founder and the Managing Partner of Baylis Emerging Markets. As an active investor in a number of operating companies across Africa, Franklin serves on the boards of several African companies. Prior to co-founding Baylis, Franklin helped lead the Strategic Credit Group the $1.8 trillion Mizuho Financial Group, where he helped establish the High Yield sales and trading, secondary loan trading, structured finance, and asset finance businesses. Franklin worked at Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. 

A Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst, Franklin holds a BA in Economics from Columbia University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Baylis is a non-BRIC private-equity emerging and frontier markets investment fund that focuses on private middle-market growth equity investments in industrial and telecom assets across Africa. Baylis focuses on less covered geographies, including francophone and post-conflict countries, where access to much needed developmental and growth capital has been an on-going issue. 

Key interview highlights: 

• Raising funds takes time whether you are raising investment funds or you are an entrepreneur looking for investment. Make sure you have a long runway; having enough funds to survive and mobilize the business for the first few years cannot be overemphasized! 
• Fundraising by fund investors can be as equally strenuous. It takes a lot of time and effort to raise funds whether you are raising funds as an investor or as a founder. 
• Emerging Market Funds like Baylis are looking for alignment around values and understanding the companies that they include in their portfolios Africa's primary source of capital is still the Development Financial Institutions. 
• The appetite for investing in Africa is low and unevenly targeted to a few countries, mostly the Anglophone countries with a dearth of investment opportunities for Francophone countries. 
• Only about 10% of private-equity deals from African funds raised ever earn any carry or hit the hurdle rate of around 8% above the hurdle rate one of the reasons being poor alignment between investment funds and recipients of investment funds 

Guest contact info/social media: Connect with Franklin on LinkedIn 

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