Christopher Emslie discusses how regulatory complexity and corruption shape treasury operations across Africa, with particular focus on South Africa's challenges with cross-border money movements and bureaucratic obstacles.
It is extremely difficult to find yourself in South Africa and then Africa and then try and understand 1 the nuances, 2 the people and then 3, the regulatory landscape. Because it is extremely difficult. It's not somewhere where you can go in, integrate yourself and just believe that things are going to happen. Unfortunately, in both South Africa and Africa things take time. There's a huge bureaucracy that you need to overcome. There's a huge regulatory burden that you need to overcome in order to be able to facilitate the deals that you're looking for or even just to facilitate the simple day to day movements of money whether it's coming from Zurich or from Europe or from the Americas into Africa. It's extremely difficult. I think having a knowledge of one, the local markets and being a local person, I think it does make life far easier. My two successes in ABB South Africa were both foreign. Tenzing was from Nepal and the current treasurer is from Zurich. So it was a little bit more difficult for them to understand what was happening and how to get a handle on it. Because unfortunately it is not just day to day business where you can get up in the morning and think well I'm going to do these 10 transactions today and it's all going to just work because you're going to hit number two and all of a sudden the whole world's going to end and you're going to be able to, you're going to have to reach out to your partners in order to facilitate the trade or the just to make sure that things are much easier. In the past Africa has been undermined by corruption. I think there's many have used the opportunity to move money across borders, to move money out of countries that really shouldn't have happened. And I think that's where the regulators and the powers that be have been decided to enough is enough that they've really put some stringent measures in place to stop that from happening. A lot of regulatory words around moving money cross border, the limits that they set that you can't just take $10 million across and out of the country, it can only be a million dollars because of the things that have happened in the past. And I think that's where people don't understand it. It's not like a transaction even now in China where you can move $50 million cross border, no problems at all. As long as you have safe approval and everything's easy and all the paperwork has been done and the government's giving you the approval, it's not a problem at all. I think in Africa it really is still difficult. There are mechanisms for it to be facilitated and to be done, but I think it's just a hardship. And I think you need to be able to navigate quickly and easy, but it's not always possible.
