Why Nsiona?
A few words from our founder.
Institutional investors want access to sustainability-enhancing opportunities in frontier and emerging markets at compelling risk-adjusted returns.
For most of them, that access is fragmented, arriving late, or in a form their investment committees cannot assess.
I know, because for eighteen years I was one of those investors: first at JPMorgan Asset Management, later at Pictet – with clients that included some of Western Europe’s largest pension funds.
The opportunities were real. The route to them, in a form a committee could approve, rarely was.
I also understand personally what unfamiliarity can cost.
I was born in Kinshasa, but raised by a Belgian family.
My adoptive father was a close friend of my biological father, Ignace Nsiona Kuzubula, who overcame great adversity to pursue education and leadership in what was then Zaire.
Growing up in Belgium and starting my career at the bottom of the ladder, I was made to understand, more than once, that I did not belong.
I would have to prove more and accept less to earn the same place. In a sense, I paid a premium for being unfamiliar.
Markets do the same to what they do not know, and issuers and businesses across frontier markets pay it every day, in basis points, on opportunities whose fundamentals merit better terms.
Nowhere is that premium wider, or less deserved, than in Africa.
Nsiona Impact exists to reduce that gap.
We source, prepare and structure sustainability-enhancing transactions from frontier and emerging markets, with Africa at the centre of our work, so that institutional capital can assess them with confidence and act on them with speed. We do it from the inside, with the presence, relationships and discipline that narrow the premium to what the risk actually warrants.
The firm carries my father’s name because that is where the conviction comes from.
If you are an investor, a development finance institution or a fund with a mandate for frontier and emerging markets, we would like to show you what that access looks like in practice.
Alain Nsiona Defise
Founder and CEO
