Banque de l'Afrique Occidentale

The Banque du Sénégal was founded by decree of Napoleon III of 21 December 1853, which established it as a discount and credit bank. It started operations in 1855 in Saint-Louis, by then the capital of French Senegal, under the rule of governor Louis Faidherbe who intended it to limit the dependence of Senegalese traders on French financiers. In 1867 the bank opened an agency in Gorée, the region's other trading center under French rule. In 1884, Dakar had became increasingly important and the bank transferred its head office there from Saint-Louis. In 1899 it opened a branch in Rufisque, the last of the colony's so-called Four Communes.^[1]

The bank's ownership structure was based on the number of slaves owned or sold at the time of the legislation of 30 April 1849 which settled compensation following the abolition of slavery. In Saint-Louis, European were a minority compared with mulattoes and blacks. The Bordeaux trading house Maurel bought shares from others and ended up holding 73 percent of the bank's capital, the other shareholders being five houses including Teisseire and Beynis, the Marseille house Charles Bohn, and five mulattoes.

The bank was granted the privilege to issue bearer banknotes for 20 years, renewed in 1874. However, at the beginning, commercial exchanges continued to be settled with convenience currencies or traditional means of exchange: gold powder, cowrie shells, iron bars, Maria Theresa thalers or silver piastres of the same weight, cotton loincloths, blocks of compressed rock salt, among others.

After 1894, the issuance privilege was renewed from year to year, and the French Government considered the creation of a new bank capable of issuing in the other colonies of Africa.

 

In 1901, the Banque du Sénégal was reorganized and its incorporation formally relocated to Paris, following the previous year's similar relocation of the Banque de l'Algérie, even though it remained mainly managed from Dakar. It was granted a role of bank of issue with a geographical scope widened to all French West Africa.

Its network continued to expand, to Conakry in 1902, Porto-Novo in 1903, Grand-Bassam in 1905, Lomé, Bamako and Brazzaville in 1925, and Cotonou in 1928.^[2] In 1903, a new building was erected on the Kermel square in Dakar.

Historians like Henri Brunschwig [fr] have pointed to the importance of the BOA in the assimilation of French West Africa into the French economic system.^[3] Its founding in 1901 came after the extension of limited taxation of subjects, forced labor laws, and voting in the colonial possessions (notably the communes of Dakar and Saint-Louis, Senegal). In 1904 it was given the right to acquire shares in commercial companies, as long as investment did not exceed a quarter of its reserves.^[4] Although it was a private investment bank, the French government authorized it to print currency, and its board always included colonial officials. It received special concessions and financial stabilisation from the government, and in essence became the financial arm of the French colonial administration.

The creation of and government support for the BOA was part of an attempt to inject investment into the French colonies. In 1880, almost all French economic interests in the area were in the form of family-run trading houses based in French port cities like Bordeaux and Marseilles. The creation of the BOA coincided with the consolidation of these trading houses into joint stock companies, the ending of formal government concessions to these houses, and the rise of a de facto monopoly of their successors.^[5] Émile Maurel (CEO of Maurel et Prom) and Henri Nouvion (managing director of Banque du Sénégal) were respectively the first president and managing director of the newly created BOA.

By the 1920s, business in the AOF was dominated by just three private joint stock companies: the Compagnie Française de l'Afrique Occidentale [fr], the Nouvelle Société Commerciale africaine, and the Société Commerciale de l'Ouest Africain [fr] (lagging slightly were the growing plantation and mining interests of the Unilever company).^[6] The BAO's board largely overlapped with the boards of these trading companies.

In 1924, the Banque Comerciale de 1'Afrique (BCA) brought the first significant competition to the BOA. When the initial privileges granted to the BOA expired in 1929, the French government granted it a further forty-year concession, with the only stipulation being that the government reserved the right to nominate the BOA's chair, and four members of its board.

In 1924, BAO expended to French Equatorial Africa buy opening branch in Brazzaville. It followed this by opening branches in Port Gentil (1928), Libreville (1930), Pointe Noire (1936), Bangui (1946), and Fort Lamy (1950).

Banking institutions, public and private, enabled colonial businesses to pull more of the West African economy into a moneyed economy and expand the replacement of traditional agriculture with large scale cash crops for export.^[7] This was most evident in the tremendous growth of groundnut plantations. The strategy of using BAO to foster inward investment was something of a failure though. Capital extraction, not capital investment was the source of French wealth in West Africa. Taxes and import/export duties coming from the African colonies to the Metropole accounted for most of the capital movement in the AOF.^[8] Tremendous legal concessions were made to the BOA, and while it dominated the banking sector, its capital remained minuscule in comparison to companies engaged in capital extraction from the AOF. The BOA held capital of 6 million francs before 1914, and that rose to 50 million in 1931, but declined thereafter. In 1940 all banks in the AOF had a total investment of just over 1.5 million francs. But forestry alone had an inward investment of almost 3.4 million francs that year.^[9]

In 1934, the BAO's main office in Côte d'Ivoire was relocated from Grand-Bassam to Abidjan.^[10]

Between 1941 and 1958, the Institut d'Émission de l'Afrique Occidentale Française et du Togo was spun off from BAO to administer the Franc des colonies françaises d'Afrique (FCFA) (25 December 1945).^[11]

In 1943, the BOA opened a counter in Magaria, and in 1944 a branch in Zinder, both near the southern border of Niger.^[12]

In December 1945, the CFA franc became the legal currency of the French territories of sub-Saharan Africa and the French government considered the nationalization of the BAO, but African parliamentarians – and in particular Lamine Guèye – thwarted this project.

In 1955, the issuance of banknotes was entrusted to a newly created Institut d'Emission de l'Afrique occidentale française et du Togo. In the early 1960s , when many African countries gained independence, the BAO had 38 offices in Africa and contributed significantly to the financing of many infrastructures in the new countries, such as Côte d'Ivoire or Senegal.

 

Its last French leaders, chairman Georges Gautier and chief executive Claude Panouillot, stepped down in 1962.

In 1965, the BAO renamed itself the Compagnie Financière France-Afrique (Cofifa) and transferred all its African banking operations to the Banque internationale pour l'Afrique occidentale (BIAO), a newly created French entity of which it owned 51 percent while the other 49 percent were owned by the First National City Bank of New York (later Citibank).^[12] Some sections in Central Africa became the Banque internationale pour la Centrafrique (BICA), while the BIAO also owned minority stakes in the Banque Internationale du Togo (30 percent) and Banque Internationale du Burkina (25 percent),^[13] the latter originally known as the Banque Internationale des Voltas.^[14]

The BIAO's operations were subject to the often turbulent politics of the respective newly independent countries. For example, by the mid-1970s the BIAO was the only private-sector financial institution left in Niger.^[15]: 3 In June 1975, the government of Benin nationalized the BIAO there and merged it together with all other commercial banks in the country into the state-owned Banque Commerciale du Bénin.^[16]: 152 In other countries, the government merely imposed the creation of a separately capitalized subsidiary in which itself and/or other stakeholders became shareholders.

From 1975 to 1986, the BIAO's chairman and CEO was Jean Dromer [fr].^[17] In 1977, Citibank exited the BIAO by selling its shares to UBS (20 percent), Banco do Brasil (20 percent),^[18] and Compagnie Inter-Africaine de Banque (CIAB), a Luxembourg holding company owned by African interests (9 percent). In 1980, the BIAO established a separate subsidiary for its operations in Niger, headquartered in Niamey with offices in Zinder, Maradi, Arlit, and Tahoua.^[12] That same year, the Ivoirien government took a 30 percent stake in BIAO-Côte d'Ivoire.^[10]

Partly as a consequence of the 1980s oil glut and of political turmoil, the BIAO entered severe financial distress at the end of the decade. In 1988, the French government directed the then state-owned Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) to lead a restructuring.^[19] During 1989, BNP increased its share of Cofifa's equity from 40.5 to 58 percent.^[20] In April 1990, BNP initiated a drastic restructuring by indicating that it would exit most or all of the BIAO's operations in Africa.^[18]

On 1 June 1990, BNP exited the BIAO's operations in Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal which were taken over in respective rescue operations led by the Central Bank of West African States.^[21] On 14 June 1990, the BIAO initiated a process of orderly liquidation, which was entrusted to administrator Jacques Piot.^[22] BIAO Cameroon was separately liquidated later in 1990.^[23]

In March 1991, BNP sold the rest of the BIAO's African network to Meridien international Bank limited (MIBL), a holding controlled by financier Andrew Sardanis and incorporated in the Bahamas.^[24] By then, BIAO no longer had any assets left in Africa,^[25] whereas BNP had successfully sold its head office building at 9, avenue de Messine in Paris.^[20] BNP was also accused to jeopardize the BIAO to the benefit of the competing network it owned at the time in Africa under the brand Banque Internationale pour le Commerce et l'Industrie (BICI),^[13] especially after MIBL we itself liquidated in a context of fraud allegations in 1995.^[24]

In Burkina Faso, the BIAO was renamed Banque Internationale du Burkina (BIB) and eventually taken over by United Bank for Africa (UBA) in November 2008. It was renamed UBA Burkina in 2012, and subsequently held by UBA (63.7 percent), the Burkina Faso government (10.2 percent), and private shareholders including the private African-owned holding COFIPA (16.8 percent).^[14]

In Côte d'Ivoire, a 80 percent take in BIAO-CI was acquired on 25 January 2000 by Brussels-based Banque Belgolaise, while the government retained the other 20 percent.^[26] In 2006, Belgolaise in turn sold its stake to a consortium led by insurer Nouvelle Société Interafricaine d'Assurance [fr] (NSIA) with the Institution de Prévoyance Sociale, an Ivoirien public fund, as a minority participant. The bank was renamed NSIA Banque in 2014, and went public in 2017.^[10]

In Gabon, the BIAO was liquidated, as it had been earlier on in Cameroon.^[13]

In Niger, BIAO-Niger absorbed the local subsidiary of Banque Nationale de Paris, the Banque International pour le Commerce et l’industrie du Niger (BICIN), on 1 April 1989. In 1991, MIBL acquired 83.6 percent of BIAO-Niger. BIAO-Niger was then acquired by Banque Belgolaise in 1995 during the liquidation of MIBL. The bank was then successively taken over by Coris Bank International in 2011, by the Nigerien government in 2012, and eventually in 2015 by the Morocco-based BCP Group.^[12]

In Senegal, the former operations of the BIAO were renamed the Compagnie Bancaire de l'Afrique Occidentale (CBAO) in 1993, by then own by Dakar-based Mimran Group 75 percent), other local private shareholders (16 percent), and the Senegalese government (9 percent).^[2] CBAO was acquired in November 2007 by Attijariwafa Bank and renamed CBAO Groupe Attijariwafa Bank.^[27]

• Banque de l'Algérie
• State Bank of Morocco
• Banque de Madagascar
• West African Economic and Monetary Union (French: Union économique et monétaire ouest-africaine)
• Central Bank of West African States (French: Banque Centrale des États de l'Afrique de l'Ouest)

• (French) History on the BEAC Website Archived 2010-02-16 at the Wayback Machine
• (French) French Central Bank: Qu'est ce que la Zone franc?
• Gary Wilder: The French Imperial Nation-state: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars. University of Chicago Press (2005). ISBN 0-226-89768-0
• Concentration Du Marche Bancaire : Attijariwafa arrive en force. Amadou FALL, Le Soleil (Dakar). 22 December 2008.
• AfDevInfo: CBAO
• CBAO.sn: Official site.