Unlike most blue chip companies that started in highbrow business districts, capitalised from deep pockets, Afrinvest (West Africa) had a humble start, said the Group Managing Director, Ike Chioke.
Recall that Afrinvest London reportedly had trading relationships across 10 sub-Saharan African countries outside of South Africa. It had a broker dealer in each of C么te d鈥橧voire, Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, etc, and, of course, Nigeria, its biggest market, where the broker dealer was Securities Transaction & Trust Company Limited (Sectrust), founded by Godwin Obaseki, who later became governor of Edo State.
Chioke worked in Afrinvest London for a while and ultimately decided to set up the franchise in Nigeria. Afrinvest Nigeria became Afrinvest Securities, a subsidiary of Sectrust in 2006, and Sectrust changed its name to Afrinvest West Africa that same year.
During a chat in Lagos recently, the investment banker traced the history of the company to his garage as soon as he returned to Nigeria in 2003.
He studied in the United Kingdom and left in 1991 for the United States, upon completion of his studies, to work with, Goldman Sachs, one of the top investment banks in Wall Street. Several years later, he returned to the UK to work for another investment bank and afterwards, returned to Nigeria.
He said, 鈥淎round 1995, I began to realise that, ultimately, I needed to go back to Nigeria. I had the opportunity of being in America, as I had a green card. But when I extrapolated my future and the lifestyle of the vice-president or managing director I aspired to become, I thought to myself, well, it鈥檚 interesting, but money doesn鈥檛 really motivate me that much, though I work in an investment banker. That鈥檚 somewhat a paradox.鈥
鈥淏ut I said I wanted to learn investment banking, and I think I needed to step out of Goldman Sachs and learn how to advise smaller companies. That was when I decided to look at Smith Barney, because it had a respected technology banking franchise on the west coast of America, in San Francisco.鈥
This dream, Chioke noted, pushed him seek to move to San Francisco in the mid-90s to deal with startups, such as AOL but ultimately ended up in London in 1998 following a series of mergers that created Salomon Smith Barney the previous year.
Chioke said he was not the original founder of Afrinvest, but his friend, Philip Iheanacho.
鈥淧hilip and I had met in 1993 or 1994 in New York when he was working for McKinsey. He then left McKinsey years later and set up Afrinvest. I joined him in London in 2002 bringing to the firm my investment banking expertise.鈥
Afrinvest, at the time in London, he pointed out, was an equities trading business, buying and selling listed shares between emerging market investors in London that wanted to trade in Africa.
On the soft side, before he returned, he met his wife, Yvonne, a Dutch national.
He recalled, 鈥淚 met her on a deal in Kenya while working for Salomon Smith Barney, and it was she who then found a transaction that brought me to Nigeria. She was mandated by a Nigerian group called Investors International London Limited, headed by Chief Bode Akindele, of blessed memory. Akindele was a very wealthy Nigerian, and he wanted to take over NITEL. In that process, I got involved in the transaction and got much more exposed to Nigeria鈥檚 investment banking opportunity, and then used the chances that came to move ourselves back to Abuja in 2003.
鈥淚n 2004, I established Afrinvest Nigeria; guess what, in the garage of my house in Maitama, Abuja. That鈥檚 how we started, very humbly. Today, we have become one of the top investment banking franchises, with many operating businesses, and nearly 200 professional staff across five offices.鈥