Adrian Fielding, Chief Executive Officer of AFIS: Between monetary fragmentation, regulatory constraints, and a lack of long-term financing, the challenge lies in transforming African savings into productive investments. Adrian Fielding, Chief Executive Officer of AFIS, the Africa Financial Industry Summit, a benchmark platform for the African financial ecosystem, unveils several solutions that could accelerate growth, job creation, and the continent's development.
He emphasizes that the African financial sector displays strong profitability, yet private sector financing remains limited. Consequently, to mobilize more capital, he advocates for financial guarantees, local currency financing, better market integration, and artificial intelligence adapted to African realities.
Why place the contradiction between financial sector profitability and capital deficit at the heart of this edition? This exact paradox characterizes African finance today.
The sector has never been more robust: in 2025, banking revenues exceeded 100 billion dollars, while the return on equity settled around 19%, nearly double the global average. However, this solidity is not yet sufficiently reflected in the financing of the real economy.
Loans to the private sector (businesses and households) represent only about 30% of the continent's banking assets, even as the annual development financing gap is estimated at 400 billion dollars. It is this equation that the AFIS, co-organized with the IFC, intends to place at the heart of the discussions.
The challenge for the coming years is no longer solely to consolidate the financial sector's growth, but to ensure that its strength translates more effectively into productive investments, value creation, and sustainable jobs for the continent. What hinders the transformation of institutional savings into long-term capital?
Africa is not short of savings. Pension funds and insurers manage approximately 775 billion dollars in assets combined.
If we add banking assets, sovereign wealth funds, public development banks, and foreign exchange reserves, the continent's domestic capital exceeds 4 000 billion dollars, according to the Africa Finance Corporation. Yet, these savings have little impact on the productive economy.
Excluding South Africa, African insurers invest almost nothing in infrastructure, whereas the global median is approximately 1% of their assets. As long as sovereign debt offers double-digit returns, longer, more complex, and less liquid investments naturally appear less attractive.
The goal is not to ask institutional investors to take risks incompatible with their mandates, but to create the conditions that make these investments possible: guarantees, first-loss, project bonds, pooling, upstream technical assistance, and vehicles that are sufficiently large and liquid. Which sectors should become the primary beneficiaries of African capital?
The guiding theme of the program is the financing of the real economy: agriculture and agro-industry, PME, infrastructure, energy, manufacturing, and housing. Agriculture is the best indicator.
It carries significant weight in employment, PIB, and the continent's food security, yet it receives only about 5% of credit. For PME, the financing gap in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 331 billion dollars.
Our role is not to dictate where capital must flow, but to create the conditions to further direct resources toward productive sectors: more abundant and reliable data, guarantee mechanisms, local currency financing, and strengthened cooperation between banks, fintechs, investors, and development institutions. Initiatives like the New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD), launched by the African Development Bank Group, illustrate this need to better coordinate stakeholders and more effectively mobilize African capital for long-term productive investment.
Which African problems should the IA prioritize solving? We need IA designed for Africa, based on local data and use cases, rather than imported solutions that do not always account for the realities of African markets.
Its potential is considerable: IA applied to financial services could contribute 80 billion dollars to the African economy by 2035 according to the BAD, provided the right conditions are met. Its applications are already well identified: improving credit scoring for populations with limited banking history, strengthening fraud detection, optimizing claims processing, and insurance pricing, among