Investment Fund Associate

**Organization Profile**:
NESsT currently manages a loan fund that actively invests in social enterprises looking to raise capital from $50K to $500K. The fund provides senior, secured debt to profitable companies looking to scale their operations to have a stronger and more sustainable social impact. The loan fund has activities in Peru and Colombia and is growing into other countries in South America, including Brazil.
**Position Overview**:
NESsT is currently looking for an Associate to help support the loan team. They will be active in all areas of the Loan Fund team. They will help the underwriting team evaluate opportunities, assist with the due diligence process, and bring the company into the NESsT portfolio. They will also help the portfolio management team in monitoring companies, evaluating their performance and helping them grow their social and environmental impacts and succeed commercially. Additionally, they will assist in originating new opportunities to help grow the pipeline. The position will report to the Investment Officer in Sao Paulo and will actively work and directly support the rest of the fund's team, with potential travel around Brazil, Peru, and Colombia.
**Key Duties & Responsibilities**:
**Underwriting and Closing Transactions**
Working closely with the underwriting team of the fund, the Associate will:
- Help to analyse and perform due diligence on SEs' financial status, credit, and property evaluations to determine the feasibility of granting loans.
- Provide support in building investment memos to present to the Credit Committee at all three stages of underwriting (L1 - introductory memo, L2 - deep dive commercial diligence and term sheet, L3 - final confirmatory diligence and legal closing).
- Own the loan finance model for each transaction: Develop and run scenarios and sensitivities for downside cases to stress test management cases.
- Highlight identified risks and make risk mitigation strategy recommendations.
- Help to execute various tasks associated with closing loans and registering collateral.
**Portfolio Management**
Working closely with the Senior Associate for Portfolio Management to support the fund's portfolio management:
- Helping to evaluate the social impact of the loan portfolio by analysing beneficiary profiles and employment situations
- Conduct interviews with beneficiaries to confirm social impact
- Work closely with portfolio companies to ensure that they are in compliance with all financial obligations and reporting requirements outlined in the loan
- Help to manage loan repayment information and maintain borrower compliance information
- Support the portfolio management team regarding non-current loans and events of default
- Support the accounting team with loan accounting reconciliation
- Support the fundraising team by pulling information from investments to help draft materials for fund investors
- Review companies' quarterly and annual impact reporting
- Assist the portfolio companies in areas that have opportunities for improvement and provide training when needed
- Give feedback to the underwriting team on what is working and what risks we are facing.
- Develop ways to improve our portfolio management systems to handle more loans with lower infrastructure costs.
- Help to document processes to improve efficiency and efficacy of the team
**Origination**
Working closely to support the origination effort to do the following:
- Proactively searching for new opportunities in defined geographies selected at the beginning of the year in Brazil
- Help filter incoming leads to quickly decide if they pass fund filters and can move to underwriting teams
**Qualifications**:
- A bachelor's degree, ideally in economics, finance, industrial engineering, business administration or similar careers and at least 3 years of work experience in similar positions.
- Demonstrated experience in and commitment to social impact. This can include volunteer positions.
- Strong project management skills, the ability to approach tasks in a highly organized, logical and diligent manner.
- Training and education in financial modelling: Ability to set up and analyse a fully functional financial model with integrated P&L, balance sheet and cashflow; ability to build and run sensitivities for various downside cases; ability to take a management team operational model and integrate with a financial loan model; ability to calculate payment schedules.
- Education and/or experience with accounting and reading of financial statements.
- Strong interpersonal and communication skills.
- Experience working in Latin America.
- Excellent verbal and written skills in Portuguese to be an effective communicator among diverse internal and external audiences;
- Advanced verbal and written skills in English. Need to be able to write investment memos in English and present opportunities to investment committees in English.
- Ability to effectively work under pressure, manage mu

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