Africa News blog

Banking on Africa

Mining companies are looking more cautiously at South Africa after a brouhaha over  shady deals. Media and diplomats are nervous of measures they fear could curtail press freedom. South Africans in general are wondering how much damage an ongoing public sector strike will do and whether it is a sign of worse labour unrest to come.

But global banking giant HSBC certainly seems to be taking a positive long term view of Africa’s biggest economy with its talks to buy up to 70 percent of South Africa’s Nedbank in a deal that could be worth more than $8 billion.

HSBC wouldn’t only be getting a strong presence in South Africa, though.

It would be getting a solid foothold on a continent set to be among the world’s fastest growing in the years to come and where it is coming from behind against well-established emerging market rivals Standard Chartered and South Africa’s own Standard Bank.

Particularly important for HSBC would be helping its Asian customers do business in Africa. Although Nedbank does not by itself have the presence across Africa that some of its rivals do, it has an alliance with West Africa-based lender Ecobank spanning the continent.

It’s hard to tell to what extent a bid for Nedbank is a bet on South Africa and how much on the rest of Africa – South Africa’s top businesses are finding it increasingly important to be strong in the rest of the continent in any case. What can be in no doubt is the intensity of the looming competition among local and global banks across Africa.

Angola broadens its reach

Nigerian, Kenyan and South African banks have been making forays into the rest of the continent in search of growth so it was interesting to see Angola’s biggest bank opening an office in Johannesburg this month.   Banco Africano de Investimentos, Angola’s biggest bank by deposits, sees the office as a launchpad for ventures further afield in the southern African region as well as in business between Angola and South Africa.

Angola’s banking sector has enjoyed huge growth since the country emerged from a three-decade long civil war in 2002 as one of the world’s fastest growing economies thanks to booming oil production and high oil prices.

And as Angola’s economy has grown, so has the OPEC member’s influence as a power within southern Africa, within Africa’s other former Portuguese colonies and within the Gulf of Guinea region that produces most of Africa’s oil.

The interest in BAI’s opening in Johannesburg was itself a sign of how keen companies are to seek deals and investments and establish a presence there.

“You wouldn’t have this sort of crowd if it was a bank from elsewhere in Africa opening up,” commented one foreign financier at the event.

But while Angola expands abroad, it isn’t always as easy for those trying to get a share of Angola’s growth.

Investors complain of frustrating officialdom, corruption, a lack of transparency and astronomical operating costs as well as the difficulties of finding businesses or instruments to invest in despite the money flowing to Angola as a result of the oil.

All change for Nigeria?

Nigeria’s central bank sliced through the hubris of the business elite with its $2.6 billion bailout out of five banks and the sacking of their heads in what looks as though it could be a new era for corporate governance in Africa’s most populous country.

Recently appointed Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi said lax governance had allowed the banks to become so weakly capitalised that they posed a threat to the entire system, and described the move as the beginning of a “restoration of confidence” in sub-Saharan Africa’s second biggest economy.

The 1.14 trillion naira ($7.6 billion) in bad loans run up by the banks is roughly equivalent to the combined annual income of the poorest 20 million people in Africa’s most populous nation, each of whom live on around $1 a day.

Yet the “Friday massacre”, as one newspaper dubbed it, set Blackberries buzzing in Lagos champagne bars not because of the breathtaking scale of the money involved, but because of the might of the corporate aristocrats felled by Sanusi’s axe.

“Ordinarily in Nigeria there is a sacred cow culture,” said Reuben Abati, a respected leader writer and chairman of the editorial board of Nigeria’s Guardian newspapers.

“Once someone is prominent in a particular industry you assume those persons are untouchable. What Sanusi has done now is to say nobody is too big to be held accountable, whether they are an Ibru or an Akingbola.”

Cecilia Ibru and Erastus Akingbola — the former chief executives of Oceanic Bank and Intercontinental Bank — were arguably the highest-profile casualties of the cull, titans in a corporate elite dominated by egos and empire builders.

from MacroScope:

Africa alone

The good news for Africa when the global financial meltdown began was that its financial markets were generally so far behind the rest of the world that groups such as the World Economic Forum reckoned that there was little or no danger. A new paper, posted on the economic research website VoxEU, suggests that that might be a bit too optimistic.

Tilburg University economist and former World Bank official Thorsten Beck -- along with the World Bank's Michael Fuchs and Marilou Uy --  write that despite shallow financial markets, sub-Saharan Africa is unlikely to escape the repercussions of the financial crisis.

Indeed, they argue that the crisis is threatening what little progress has been made to reverse what they call the alarming superficiality of African finance.

African financial systems are small, both in absolute and relative terms . In addition, Africa’s financial systems are characterised by very limited outreach, with less than one in five households having access to any formal banking service. Banking is inefficient and expensive in Africa, as reflected by high interest spreads and margins and high overhead costs. Banking is also very expensive for deposit customers, as reflected by very high minimum balance requirements and annual fees in many African countries. High documentation requirements to open an account – that is, the need to present several documents of identification – also represent significant barriers given that large parts of the population live and work in the informal sector. Similarly, physical access is limited, as the low bank branch and ATM penetration numbers for Africa illustrate.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the report for the region, however, is that the authors reckon Africa is more or less on its own when it comes to fixing this.

For better or worse, the future of Africa’s financial systems is closely linked to the development of global finance, as are its real economies. However, it is up to Africa’s financial sector stakeholders – bankers, donors, and policymakers – to guide financial sector reforms in a way that maximises Africa’s opportunities, learning both from their own experience over the past 50 years and the experience in other emerging and developed economies.

The big question is whether such stakeholders will do so.

from Global Investing:

Terminal problems

If Nigerian banks appear to have suffered disproportionately in the global financial crisis, maybe they have Heathrow Terminal 5 to blame.

Nigerian banks were advertising their services on billboards in Terminal 5 last year, and travelling investors felt it showed the banks were rashly trying to keep up with international investment banks in aiming for a global profile, causing many to sell, a banker specialising in Africa told journalists this morning over breakfast.

"Those adverts were a sign to sell Nigerian banks," Luca del Conte, executive director in treasury and capital markets at Medicapital Bank said.

"We have about 100 institutional investors, and of 50 funds that we speak to actively, more than half mentioned this.  Once capital markets started shaking, funds did not ask any more questions, they just sold."

Medicapital says the banking sector represents over 60 percent of market capitalisation on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, but daily volumes on the exchange have dwindled to $10-15 million a day, suffering also from a fall in the oil price, compared with $100 million a year ago.