How the model works

The chain

From capital to a trading unit, in five steps.

01

Ring-fenced SPV

Your investment establishes a special purpose vehicle dedicated to your mandate. It holds its own assets, its own loan book and its own governance. It is not commingled with other investors' capital and it is not exposed to obligations incurred elsewhere in the group.

02

Format selection

Franchises are screened against the ecosystem's criteria — trading history, franchisor strength, unit economics, supply chain, and whether an incubator with genuine operating experience in that franchise format exists. A format with no incubator behind it does not get funded, however attractive the numbers look.

03

Operator and staff placement

The operator and staff are drawn from the human capital pipeline, not from the open market: recruited, trained against the franchise format, assessed, and observed before placement. They are diligenced as seriously as the business itself.

04

Lend and establish

The SPV lends to the franchise investor, or directly establishes the franchise unit. Drawdown is staged against establishment milestones rather than released in a lump sum, so capital is never sitting idle in an account that has not yet earned it.

05

Operate under oversight

The incubator remains actively involved in the business. Mentors on operations; finance, fund management and governance on the numbers. Reporting runs to the SPV, so deterioration is visible while it is still cheap to fix.

The vehicle

A ring-fenced SPV, per mandate.

A family office should never have to take a view on the rest of a manager's book in order to take a view on its own money.

Mandate: The SPV is constituted either as a lending platform that funds hundreds of franchises, or as a holding company that owns them — or as a blend of the two. Whichever it is, it is sized for a portfolio, not for a handful of units. Compare the two structures →
Separation: The SPV is a distinct legal entity. Its assets, its loan book and its liabilities are its own, and its exposure is limited to the programme it was established for.
Governance: Its own board and investment committee, with investor representation. UAFIN brings the finance, fund management and governance function; the investor retains a seat and a vote at the level where capital is committed.
Security: Loans are secured against the unit's assets and the franchise rights, with cession of the trading accounts. The franchise agreement itself is part of the security package.
Step-in rights: Provisions to replace an operator, take over the unit, or transfer the franchise to another operator from the pipeline, on defined triggers. Available whether you invest directly in a unit or indirectly through the platform.
Reporting: Unit-level trading reported into the SPV on a standalone cycle, so performance is assessed against the format's own benchmarks rather than against a narrative.
Exit: Loan amortisation, equity participation in the ventures created, and defined realisation events. Set out in full in the investment memorandum.

Proof of concept

Buy the evidence before you buy the thesis.

We recommend that every substantial investor starts with three to five franchises, not with the full mandate — and then scales to hundreds.

A proof of concept at that size is large enough to be real — several formats, several operators, several trading environments — and small enough that the decision to proceed or to stop is inexpensive either way. It converts our argument into your data.

It is not, however, the destination. A handful of units is a test, not an investment; at that size the portfolio is too small to carry its own overhead, too concentrated to be diversified, and too minor to interest anyone on exit. The purpose of the proof of concept is to earn the right to deploy at three hundred, where the structure becomes a substantial operating group and the impact becomes material. See the ramp and the two structures →

Three to five units, deliberately across different sectors and locations.
The full structure in miniature: the same SPV, the same security, the same incubator, the same reporting.
Real trading history you own, benchmarked against the franchisor's own network data.
A defined decision point at the end of it — scale, adjust the format mix, or stop.
If it scales, the proof of concept units roll up into the larger mandate rather than being unwound.

A platform confident in its model should be the one recommending the smaller first commitment. We would rather earn a mandate on evidence than win it on argument.

Oversight

What "incubation" means here.

The word is used loosely across the market, so it is worth being specific. Incubation in this ecosystem is two standing functions, contracted for the life of the loan, not a support offer the operator may call on if they choose.

Impact

Commercial first, which is why the impact holds.

Each unit is a real business with real customers, so the jobs it creates are funded by trading rather than by a grant cycle. That is the difference between impact that survives the end of a programme and impact that does not.

The transformation outcome is structural too: ownership moves on exit to operators drawn from the pipeline, in sectors and locations where that ownership has been scarce. It is a consequence of how the model is built, not a reporting exercise layered on afterwards.

And it only becomes consequential with volume. One unit employs about 7 people on the sector's own figures — worth having, and not something a country notices. Three hundred units employ some two thousand, create hundreds of new business owners, and put trading enterprises into townships, rural nodes and mining host communities at a density that shifts a local economy rather than decorating it. Scale is not vanity here. It is the point at which the impact stops being anecdotal.

Investing at scale Franchise league table

Structure is the risk control.