Standard Bank Group has set itself a capital-allocation target that would reshape the geography of its earnings: doubling its West African business by 2030, so that a region currently generating roughly half the revenue of its South African operations grows to match the scale of its home market. The plan, outlined by Luvuyo Masinda, the Johannesburg-based lender’s head of corporate and investment banking, reflects a calculated bet that economic reforms in Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast are finally unlocking investable value in Africa’s largest market.
“If you speak to the teams here, they have an ambition to double this business in the next four years,” Masinda said in an interview. “One of the things we will want is that for this west Africa region to as quickly as possible be the same size as South African business.”
The bank’s leadership frames the push as a response to a market it believes it has underexploited. “When we think about our own business as Standard Bank Group, we believe we are slightly sub-scale for the opportunities that exist in this market,” Masinda said. For Africa’s biggest lender, that admission amounts to a strategic verdict: the returns on offer in West Africa now justify deploying more of the group’s balance sheet eastward and westward from its South African base.
The investment case rests heavily on Nigeria, West Africa’s biggest economy and the continent’s most populous nation. Reforms to the foreign-exchange market, the broader macroeconomy and the energy industry have boosted investor confidence and begun to unlock value in the country’s assets, drawing capital into its abundant natural resources and infrastructure sectors. From a banker’s perspective, that combination of reform and undervalued assets is precisely the environment in which dealmaking and project finance generate fees and returns.
Meanwhile, Masinda sees the same dynamics replicated in Ivory Coast, one of the region’s fastest-growing economies, and in Ghana, which is recovering from its 2022 to 2023 sovereign-debt default. Ghana’s stabilising inflation, lower interest rates and a steadier local currency have restored conditions in which lenders and investors can price risk with some confidence.
The group’s plan for capturing these opportunities is explicitly capital-led. Standard Bank intends to invest in and structure deals across the region’s power, renewables, ports and hard infrastructure sectors, leveraging the parent company’s balance sheet and tapping global capital through its offices in New York, Dubai, London and Beijing. That access to international funding pools is central to the strategy: the bank is positioning itself as the conduit through which global money reaches West African projects.
Growth will not come from dealmaking alone. The lender is also looking to make new hires in the region and to use fintech to expand its retail and small- to medium-sized business clientele, widening its deposit and lending base beyond corporate and investment banking.
Masinda points to a broader shift that he says is drawing financing and private equity into African markets: improved regulatory environments, particularly in countries with floating, transparent exchange rates and predictable monetary policy. “It’s happening not just in Nigeria, it’s happening in a number of other countries,” he said. “That, more than anything, is attractive to capital.” For a bank whose expansion depends on cross-border flows, that improvement in the risk environment is arguably the single most important variable underpinning the 2030 target.
The equity markets are expected to play their part as well. Masinda noted there are “quite a lot” of initial public offerings in the pipeline across retail, fintech, telecommunications and infrastructure, though some IPO processes have slowed as changing valuations give issuers and investors pause. Geopolitics adds further friction. Conflict in the Middle East “doesn’t help because it alters prices and it delays, it makes people less confident,” he said.
By contrast, West Africa is not the only frontier for the group’s capital. Outside the region, Standard Bank is targeting growth in countries including Kenya, Angola and Egypt, Masinda said, signalling that the sub-scale verdict applies across multiple African markets where the bank believes its balance sheet can be put to fuller use.
The arithmetic behind the ambition is straightforward. A business currently worth about half of the South African operation, doubled over four years, would approach parity with the home market. Whether reforms in Nigeria and Ghana hold their course, and whether global capital stays confident enough to fund the pipeline, will determine if that target is met or merely aspirational.