Debt-Maturity Options Director

The mandate

The group faces a concentrated maturity wall while currency depreciation, higher rates and customer contract concentration weaken conventional refinancing. Management has assembled separate bank, bond and asset-monetisation proposals using inconsistent forecasts and covenant assumptions. The defined problem is to create comparable executable funding routes early enough to preserve choice, without treating optimistic tower valuations or uncommitted lender interest as liquidity certainty.

The deliverables are a lender-grade base case, debt and security map, covenant-and-cash waterfall, refinancing option book, market-sounding evidence, execution timetable and board decision dossier. Options must test local and hard currency, secured and unsecured instruments, tower or receivable collateral, maturity extension, partial prepayment, cash sweeps, hedging, trapped cash and rating implications across country entities.

Four milestones govern six months: week five accepts the common forecast and debt map; week twelve approves option structures and downside assumptions; week nineteen concludes controlled market soundings with documented terms and conditions; and week twenty-six delivers ranked routes, execution dependencies, fallback triggers and board decisions. Billing follows formal acceptance of each milestone.

Acceptance requires treasury and country finance to reproduce the forecast, legal counsel to confirm security and covenant interpretations, proposed lenders to provide attributable non-binding evidence, and every option to show currency, cash, covenant and operating consequences under downside. The board must be able to choose a primary and fallback route without relying on consultant relationships or unexplained valuation adjustments.

The client provides facility and bond documents, security records, contracts, cash forecasts, country restrictions, ratings materials, tax and legal opinions, lender access and asset data. The consultant does not arrange or underwrite debt, negotiate binding terms, value assets, issue legal or tax advice, select lenders for compensation, hedge currencies or sign financing documents.

Why this is external work

Banks promote products they can provide, country teams protect local liquidity and corporate leaders compare headline coupons while structural conditions differ. The approaching wall makes those partial views dangerous. Independent funding expertise can normalise assumptions, test genuine market appetite, expose execution dependencies and preserve fallback choices without earning an arrangement fee from whichever route the board selects. That independence matters when apparently cheaper capital carries restrictive cash sweeps or currency exposure outside the headline coupon.

What you will own

• Reconcile debt, maturity, security, guarantee, covenant, cash sweep, hedging and entity restrictions into one funding map.
• Establish a lender-grade operating and cash case with common tower, tenancy, churn, currency and capital assumptions.
• Structure comparable bank, bond, asset-backed, local-currency, extension and prepayment routes with conditions explicit.
• Test downside for customer loss, currency move, rate increase, trapped cash, delayed capex and weaker asset value.
• Conduct controlled market soundings that distinguish indicative appetite, required diligence, internal approvals, documentation conditions and executable capacity before the maturity window narrows.
• Sequence decisions, notices, consents, security work, ratings engagement and fallback activation before liquidity deadlines.
• Deliver the option book, evidence record, primary and contingency routes and unresolved board trade-offs.

Candidate qualifications

• Has designed and executed refinancing choices for telecom towers, infrastructure or another multicountry hard-asset operator.
• Understands secured debt, bonds, asset-backed structures, local currency, cash sweeps, covenants, ratings and hedging interactions.
• Can compare market routes on consistent operating and downside forecasts rather than headline pricing, optimistic asset values or unsupported currency assumptions alone.
• Has conducted lender soundings without overstating conditional interest or compromising negotiating position and confidentiality.
• Has preserved a viable fallback when a preferred capital-markets or bank route deteriorated before closing.
• Produces board choices independent of placement, underwriting, valuation and success-fee incentives.

Non-negotiables

• Can attend Johannesburg working sessions, both lender soundings and monthly finance-committee reviews.
• Will disclose relationships with banks, funds, rating agencies, tower investors, advisers and prospective financing counterparties.
• Brings executed infrastructure refinancing across currencies; generic corporate modelling alone is insufficient.
• Will not accept arrangement, placement, success or lender-introduction compensation through this engagement.

1. 49 words maximum. Which refinancing condition most often turns indicative lender appetite into unusable capacity?
2. 49 words maximum. How would you compare local-currency debt with cheaper hard-currency funding under downside?
3. 49 words maximum. What fallback trigger must the board decide before pursuing its preferred route?