Speakers

With two decades of experience spanning private equity, investment banking and C-suite finance leadership, Tim Souter has built his career at the intersection of Africa's investment ecosystem and its digital infrastructure build-out. He was recently appointed Data Centre Executive at AIIM (African Infrastructure Investment Managers), one of the continent's most established infrastructure investors, tasked with leading the build-out of AIIM's data centre platform following the signing of a recent acquisition.

Tim's investment grounding was forged over nearly a decade as an Investment Partner at Ethos Private Equity where he led origination, execution and portfolio management across a c.$2bn AUM platform, and spearheaded Ethos' ICT investment strategy across digital infrastructure and services. His investment career began at Macquarie Group, in corporate finance and principal investments, working on LBOs, M&A and financial structuring across South Africa and the US.

On the operating side, Tim has served as Group CFO to two fast-scaling African fintechs — Zone, Africa's layer-1 blockchain payments network (where he led a group restructure and a $9.5m seed round backed by venture capital), and most recently Fido, a credit-first neobank for the unbanked across Sub-Saharan Africa. Between these roles, he founded Cordwainer Advisory, providing contract CFO and commercial due diligence services to private equity and infrastructure funds and their portfolio companies.

He holds a Master of Finance (with Distinction) from INSEAD, is a CFA charterholder, and holds a Bachelor of Business Science (Finance) from the University of Cape Town.