Trajectories — Portrait No. 10 At end-June 2025, Nedbank carried its 21.2% of Ecobank Transnational at R1.8bn against a market value of R1.9bn. It sold the block four months later for $100m — roughly R1.8bn. The headline that a Cameroonian financier bought for a fifth of what the seller paid is arithmetically true and analytically...

In seven months, three CEMAC sovereigns raised roughly $2.52 billion on international bond markets at coupons between 8.9% and 9.5%. In the whole of 2025, Central African companies attracted $27 million in venture capital — 0.7% of Africa’s total. That gap, not the absence of capital, is the region’s real financing problem. AFSIC – Investing...

The money hasn’t left Africa. It has simply become much harder to convince. Institutional investors are no longer asking whether the continent holds promise; they want to know how that promise is being captured, measured and converted into liquidity. Two fund managers — Anza, based in Johannesburg, and Farmties Capital — agreed to describe what...

A payments stack that clears transactions in Lagos will not necessarily clear them in Nairobi. What performs in Accra can stall in Kampala. That fragmentation is the wall most companies hit when they try to scale across the continent — and it is precisely the market Tola Mobile has chosen to occupy. The payments infrastructure...

Africa’s capital markets have become more selective, not smaller — and selectivity puts the pressure on execution rather than on money. Oxford Saïd arrives at AFSIC 2026 as a headline sponsor betting on the input that takes longest to build: people. Foreign direct investment into Africa reached roughly $70bn in 2025, down from an exceptional...

Ask a hundred founders whether they are investor ready and ninety will show you a deck. Fifteen slides, a chart bending up and to the right, a market size with eleven digits. The document is clean. It proves nothing. A deck describes what a company wants to be. Investor readiness describes what it is —...

Central Africa just plugged into the continent’s largest payment network. What that changes now — and what it doesn’t yet. On 9 July 2026, the Bank of Central African States (BEAC) officially joined the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), the cross-border payment network built by Afreximbank with the African Union and the AfCFTA Secretariat....

United Bank for Africa Plc has announced that Mr. Tony O. Elumelu, CFR, Group Chairman of UBA, will retire from the Board of Directors of UBA on 21 August 2026, upon the completion of the 12-year tenure limit prescribed for Non-Executive Directors of Banks by the Central Bank of Nigeria. At its meeting held on...