Client Solution Specialist

The purpose of the Client Solution Specialist role is to design and structure innovative and alternative financing solutions that enable municipalities to become investment-ready for infrastructure finance and development projects. The role focuses on origination support, strategic advisory, financial structuring, stakeholder engagement, and partnership development to strengthen municipal capability, expand financing options, and accelerate sustainable infrastructure delivery.

Key Responsibilities

1. Deal Origination

• Support origination initiatives with a strong focus on financial structuring, transaction advisory, and solution design.
• Engage municipalities to understand financial, institutional, and operational challenges, co-creating tailored financing and capability solutions.
• Conduct early-stage risk assessments to identify financial, operational, institutional, and implementation risks and develop appropriate mitigation strategies.
• Identify and assess municipal infrastructure projects with potential for alternative and blended financing.
• Prepare high-quality inputs into funding proposals, concept notes, and investment memoranda.
• Establish and manage strategic partnerships with DFIs, commercial financiers, donors, development agencies, and private-sector partners to expand financing options.

2.Product Development

• Design and implement innovative financing solutions tailored to municipal contexts, including blended finance, concessional funding, guarantees, and risk-sharing mechanisms.
• Develop and refine financial products and instruments addressing municipal infrastructure funding gaps.
• Benchmark product offerings against global best practices in municipal and infrastructure finance.
• Pilot and evaluate new financing instruments, funding models, and advisory frameworks.
• Align product development initiatives with regulatory, institutional, and development mandates.
• Structure innovative financing and investment solutions that enhance bankability and affordability of municipal infrastructure projects.
• Collaborate with legal and technical teams to ensure feasibility and compliance, to ensure alignment of products with regulatory and institutional frameworks.
• Present structured solutions to internal committees and external partners for approval and funding mobilisation.

3. Infrastructure Finance and Financial Structuring

• Develop and analyse cashflow forecasting models for municipal infrastructure transactions.
• Assess municipal financial sustainability, affordability, creditworthiness, and funding capacity.
• Structure financing solutions aligned with municipal revenue streams, grant allocations, borrowing capacity, and fiscal constraints.
• Structure funding solutions incorporating bilateral, syndicated, blended finance, and public-private funding arrangements.
• Design innovative funding structures utilising capital grants as catalytic capital to leverage private investment.
• Develop financing models that crowd in commercial financiers, institutional investors, DFIs, and development partners.
• Prepare investment memoranda, concept notes, funding proposals, and strategic recommendations for internal and external stakeholders.
• Structure project finance and corporate finance transactions to support municipal infrastructure delivery.
• Evaluate and recommend suitable financial instruments including:

o Blended finance structures
o Guarantees
o Credit enhancement facilities
o Risk-sharing mechanisms
o Concessional funding arrangements
o Special purpose funding vehicles

• Present structured transactions to internal committees, funders, investors, and strategic partners for approval and funding mobilisation.

4. Monitoring and Evaluation

• Monitor transaction execution, financial performance, and compliance with agreed terms.
• Support municipalities in strengthening financial management, governance, and project delivery capacity.
• Measure and report on development outcomes, sustainability indicators, and programme impact.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing, lessons learned, and continuous improvement across the programme.

5. Relationship Management and Business Development

• Develop and maintain strong relationships with municipal clients, government departments, DFIs, commercial banks, donors, and implementing partners.
• Identify partnership opportunities that expand infrastructure financing options and increase funding mobilisation.
• Build and maintain strong relationships with Municipal stakeholders, global and regional private businesses, banking and multilateral partners and government officials to further develop specific investment opportunities.
• Manage relationships at various levels with the relevant project stakeholders, partners, and lead promoters, in accordance with the project’s development objectives.
• Ensure continuous communication with DBSA-funded project clients to support the division’s monitoring function.

Undertake other tasks as assigned by the line manager, from time to time.

Key Measurements of Outputs

1. Number and quality of bankable municipal transactions structured.
2. Value of funding mobilised through alternative financing solutions.
3. Success rate of investment approvals and financial close.
4. Strength and effectiveness of strategic partnerships.
5. Client satisfaction and development impact.

Expertise & Technical Competencies

Minimum Qualification

1. A Post-Graduate Degree in Finance, Business (such as an MBA), Accounting, Engineering, Economics, or related.
   Minimum Experience

2. A minimum of 10 years’ relevant work experience in infrastructure finance, municipal finance, public finance, development finance, investment advisory, or transaction structuring environments.

3. In-depth knowledge and understanding of municipal finance, intergovernmental relation (IGR) framework (including Provincial borrowing frameworks), local government fiscal framework, especially grant framework, municipal governance and revenue systems.

4. Proven experience in financial structuring, alternative finance, blended finance, and transaction advisory.

5. Demonstrated experience in municipal engagement, stakeholder management, and partnership development.

6. Experience in developing new business strategies and opportunities to create a pipeline of development impact projects, ensuring deal flow and bankability.

7. Comprehensive knowledge of the complex public sector financial and regulatory environments, including PFMA and MFMA.

8. In-depth knowledge and understanding of the infrastructure market and the Municipal landscape.

9. Demonstrable experience in identifying client challenges and playing an active part in finding innovative solutions.

Desirable Requirements

1. Experience in securing infrastructure investment deals in the public sector/municipalities.
2. Strong networks and relations with clients, global and regional private investors and banks to identify and source viable projects/investments.

TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES
a) Project Management

• Defines, plans, and manages large and/or strategic projects, including those with a high degree of technical complexity, with impacts across the organisation and/or with national implications.
• Assembles and leads diverse and multi-disciplinary teams, ensuring maximum effective resource utilisation.
• Successfully manages substantial project budgets and reports directly to senior managers on the progress and results of projects.
• Identifies complex issues that need escalation and proposes appropriate corrective actions.

b) Business Development

• Takes overall lead for proactive business development at the national and international level.
• Initiates, reviews, and interprets competitor environment reviews and takes actions accordingly.
• Formulates and modifies market approaches based on competitor analyses.
• Leads the formulation, development and implementation of the business development strategy to generate new business opportunities in public and private sector delivery of infrastructure.
• Identifies and develops new markets, products and clients.
• Leads the participation and presentation of an organisation at investment conferences and roundtable discussions.
• Coordinates business activities to ensure that investment initiatives are in support of government BEE strategies, broader national and regional economic development strategies.

c) Solution Focus

• Identifies broad, highly complex problems based on a multitude of factors, many of which are complex and sweeping in nature, difficult to define and often contradictory.
• Creates procedures to articulate the nature of problems and to identify and weigh alternate solutions.
• Evaluates the effectiveness of solutions using approaches tailored to the situation.

d) Deal Structuring

• Uses credit enhancement techniques to structure deals and optimise pricing in terms of Basel principles.
• Has an in-depth and practical understanding of how to optimise the Capital Structure, collateral package, and debt repayment profile.
• Interrogates financial models, including those with a high degree of complexity, to develop an optimal structure.
• Identifies complex structural issues that need escalation and proposes appropriate bankable structures.
• Demonstrates knowledge of advanced structuring, including the use of derivatives, syndicated loans, synthetic loans, securitisations, inflation-linked debt, credit default swaps and subordinated debt.
• Prepares specialised or tailored reports relating to new innovative instruments, gathers information from a variety of sources, analyse and include in a report for new product approval committees.
• Compiles comprehensive specialist reports as required for inclusion in credit committee submissions.

e) Financial Analysis

• Serves as subject matter expert.
• Evaluates and determines fiscal, operational, and service impacts; analyses and evaluates legislation; and implements and evaluates statistical models in their subject areas.
• Demonstrates in-depth technical and administrative knowledge of the rules and regulations in the subject area and can defend analyses, testimony, and recommendations relating to a variety of issues before management and commissions.

Required Personal Attributes

BEHAVIOURAL COMPETENCIES
a) Customer Service Orientation

• Tries to understand the underlying needs of customers and matches these needs to available or customised products and services.
• Adapts processes and procedures to meet ongoing customer needs.
• Utilises the feedback received by customers to develop new and/or improve existing services/ products that relate to their ongoing needs.
• Thinks of new ways to align DBSA’s offerings with future customer needs.

b) Integrity

• Acts consistent with basic values of openness and honesty.
• Acts consistent with values and beliefs.
• Acts on values when it is not easy to do so.
• Acts on values when a significant cost or risk is associated with doing so.

c) Self-awareness and Self Control

• Withholds effects of strong emotions in difficult situations.
• Keeps functioning or responds constructively despite stress.
• May apply special techniques or plan ahead of time to manage emotions or stress.

d) Achievement Orientation

• Undertakes challenging assignments and strives to complete them.
• Sets priorities and chooses goals based on calculated costs, anticipated benefits and improvement of performance.
• Aims at exceptional performance; setting out to achieve a unique standard.
• Constantly analyses outcomes to ensure the achievement of business goals.
• Identifies short-term opportunities or potential problems, aiming to achieve better outcomes.

e) Analytical Thinking

• Identifies multiple elements of a problem and breaks down each of those elements in detail, showing causal relationships between them.
• Uses several analytical techniques to identify several solutions and weighs the value of each.

f) Conceptual thinking

• Creates new concepts that are not obvious to others and not learned from previous education or experience to explain situations or resolve problems.
• Looks at things in a significantly novel way, breakthrough thinking.

g) Strategic and Innovative thinking

• Experiments with new approaches, tests scenarios, questions assumptions and challenges conventional thinking.
• Creates new concepts that are not obvious to others, leveraging internal and external sources of information, to build incremental revenue and growth opportunities.
• Recognises opportunities or problems emerging in patterns and trends, and their impact on the business and profitability drivers.
• Applies learning from previous situations and experiences.
• Sees underlying causality in the current situation. Applies business acumen to make sound decisions.
• Recognises opportunities or potential problems, before they become obvious, by seeing the connections in a range of sources of information, including insights from outside DBSA.
• Restates complex knowledge in a way that makes it easier for others to understand.

h) Teamwork & Cooperation

• Acts to promote a friendly climate and good morale and resolves conflicts.
• Creates opportunities for cross-functional working.