Financial Services

Africa’s banking sector looks promising for the future, Its markets are fast growing and nearly twice as profitable as the global average. Although competition is heightening and regulation is tightening, there is still much room to grow: Africa’s retail-banking penetration stands at just 38 percent of GDP, which is half the global average for emerging markets.

Africa today has the second-fastest-growing banking market -taking retail and wholesale banking together—in the world. Between 2012 and 2017, African banking-revenue pools grew at a compound annual growth rate of 11%. Africa is also the global banking industry’s second-most profitable region: the Return on Equity(ROE) of its banks in 2017 stood at 14.9 percent, second only to Latin America and comparable to other regions such as emerging Asia and the Middle East.

In terms of size, Africa’s current banking market is approximately $86 billion in revenues before risk cost. Our projected growth for Africa’s banking-revenue pools of 8.5 percent a year between 2017 and 2022 will bring the continent’s total banking revenues to $129 billion. Of that total, $53 billion will be in retail banking—up from $35 billion in 2017—an absolute growth in retail-banking revenues of $18 billion.

Another notable feature of Africa’s banking landscape is the staggering growth in the number of people becoming banked. As of 2017, there were almost 300 million banked Africans, up from 170 million in 2012. We project this figure will reach 450 million by 2022, meaning that close to half of Africans at that time will be banked, compared with just more than one-third today.

Top Banks in Africa:

• Standard Bank Group (South Africa)
• Absa Group (South Africa)
• National Bank of Egypt
• Group Banques Populaire (Morocco)
• Zenith Bank (Nigeria)
• Ecobank Transnational (Togo)