On 31 August 2026, the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority granted D and T Ethiopia Management Consulting PLC, known to every client in Addis Ababa simply as Deloitte Ethiopia, a licence to operate as an investment bank. ECMA's own licensee directory records the firm's registration, and the licence itself was confirmed the same day by Ethiopian Monitor and separately by StockMarket.et, both reporting that the upgrade follows a formal assessment of Deloitte's licence application and brings Ethiopia's total number of licensed investment banks to nine. It also makes Deloitte only the second foreign-linked entity authorised to do investment banking in the country, after Nigeria's United Capital Financial Services PLC was licensed in June.
Who this is for: Risk Managers and Internal Auditors, and the Company Secretaries and board members who sit on procurement or deal committees, at any Ethiopian bank, insurer, MFI or corporate weighing a capital raise, rights offer or M&A transaction.
What the licence actually lets Deloitte do
Investment banking, under ECMA's licensing categories, is a non-brokerage service. It covers advising on mergers, acquisitions and corporate reorganisations, structuring equity capital markets transactions, and general transaction advisory work, the kind of mandate a company preparing for a rights offer or an ESX listing needs. It does not, and this point was reportedly made explicit by ECMA itself, authorise Deloitte to act as a securities broker or dealer. Deloitte had held a Securities Investment Advisor licence since 2024; this is an upgrade in scope, not a new entrant appearing from nowhere.
That distinction matters for anyone drafting a mandate letter. A firm licensed for investment banking can run your deal process, negotiate terms and structure the offer. It cannot execute the trade on an exchange floor on your behalf. Knowing which licence category your adviser holds, and what it does not cover, is the first thing a procurement committee should check, and ECMA's own licensee directory is the place to check it, not the firm's own marketing material.
The question this specific licence puts on the table
Deloitte Ethiopia's core business, globally and locally, has long been audit, tax and management consulting. A global network built its reputation on the wall between "the firm that checks your numbers" and "the firm that helps you raise money" being a real one, reinforced in most mature markets by professional-conduct rules that restrict an audit firm from also advising the same client on a capital-markets transaction in the same period. Ethiopia's capital market is young enough that this specific scenario, one licensed firm holding both an advisory pedigree and a fresh investment banking mandate, has not really been tested here before.
Nothing in ECMA's announcement suggests Deloitte Ethiopia has done anything other than clear a legitimate licensing bar. The point is not that this licence is a problem. It is that Ethiopian boards, most of which have never had to ask a capital-markets conflict question before because there was no capital market to ask it about, now need a habit of asking it, for Deloitte and for whichever of the other eight licensed investment banks they eventually engage.
Three judgement calls a deal committee should actually make
These are not legal tests; they are the practical questions a risk or audit function should be comfortable putting to any candidate adviser, including one it already trusts.
Would you appoint the firm that audits your annual accounts to also run your rights offer in the same year? If the answer is "we hadn't thought about it," that is the finding, not a comfortable one to discover after the mandate is signed.
Does the adviser's engagement letter say who inside the firm is walled off from your institution's other work with them, and can they name the individuals, not just describe a policy? A firm that cannot answer this concretely on request has not actually built the wall it says it has.
If the deal goes wrong, who in your own institution signed off on using an adviser that also does other paid work for you, and is that decision minuted anywhere a later reviewer could find it? An unminuted verbal approval is not a control.
None of this requires Ethiopia to have specific rules against dual-role engagements yet; a Company Secretary or Risk Manager who runs these three questions before appointing any of the country's nine licensed investment banks is doing the job an eventual rule would formalise anyway.
Why the answer is different at a family-run or NGO-descended institution
A private, closely held Ethiopian company or an NGO-descended microfinance institution is used to trusting one long-standing adviser for everything: the same audit firm, the same lawyer, sometimes the same consultant who has quietly known the business for a decade. That trust is not misplaced, and it is not the thing to abandon. But it is a different question from whether that same trusted firm should also run a capital-markets transaction where its independence, real or perceived, will be scrutinised by ECMA, by co-investors and eventually by a market that has started paying attention. We saw a version of this same shift in habits when Meba became the first microfinance institution to register securities with ECMA: information and relationships that used to move on trust inside a small circle now sit inside a regime built for a wider, more formal shareholder base. Advisor selection is the same muscle, applied earlier in the process, before the raise rather than during it.
It also sits next to the discipline we set out for issuers preparing to list, in what to build before you list on the ESX: an insider list and an information barrier only work if the people and firms named on them are chosen with the same rigour the wall itself is meant to enforce.
Building the habit before the next mandate, not during it
A short, standing policy costs little and closes most of the gap:
- Require every candidate capital-markets adviser to disclose, in writing, all other paid work it currently performs for your institution, before a mandate letter is signed.
- Record the board or committee's conflict assessment in minutes, even when the conclusion is "no conflict identified," so the reasoning exists if anyone asks later.
- Ask any adviser that also does audit or consulting work for you to name, specifically, which individuals and teams are excluded from the deal team, and keep that list on file.
- Revisit the disclosure at each major transaction milestone, not only at the start, since the adviser's other engagements with you can change mid-deal.
Turning that into a standing discipline, rather than a question someone remembers to ask only after a deal has already gone sideways, is exactly what DaraCorp's Conflict of Interest Management course is built to embed, and it sits naturally alongside Risk Management & Compliance for the wider governance structure a growing capital market now expects boards to demonstrate.
This article describes how Ethiopian institutions might reasonably assess capital-markets adviser conflicts and is not legal advice or a definitive interpretation of ECMA's licensing rules or conduct requirements. Confirm current licensing details against the primary source at ecma.gov.et and take professional advice on your institution's specific adviser arrangements.