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Cameroonian banker Alain Nkontchou has made a significant investment in Ecobank Transnational Incorporation (Ecobank), one of West and Central Africa’s leading independent regional banking groups.
According to a notification of insider dealing published on the Nigerian Exchange, the leading Cameroonian banker purchased a total of 123.4 million shares in Ecobank between December 2020 and August 2021.
Nkontchou, who is also the chairman of the Togo-based financial services group, executed multiple transactions on the floor of the Nigerian Exchange at an average price of N5.88 ($0.013) per share.
The total consideration for the shares was put at N689 million ($1.52 million), increasing his stake in the group above 1.06 percent or 261,714,332 shares, and making him the largest individual shareholder in the pan-African banking group.
Ecobank serves both wholesale and retail customers in 36 African countries and has been working to give small- and medium-sized enterprises in Sub-Saharan Africa the necessary digital skills to leverage online resources for business growth.
The bank in recent years has partnered with companies such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, GitHub, and the Ecobank Academy for this purpose.
This focus on technology has paid off for the bank, as it reported a 23-percent increase in profit in the first half of 2022, from $106 million to $130 million. The increase in profit was driven by the strong performance of its payment business, its well-diversified earnings base, and its investments across key segments, including technology.
At the time of writing, Ecobank’s shares were worth N12 ($0.0265) on the Nigerian Exchange, making the lender the 17th most valuable company on the exchange with a market capitalization of N220 billion ($486 million) representing 0.77 percent of the local bourse’s total capitalization.
At the current price level, the market value of Nkontchou’s stake in Ecobank is valued at N3.1 billion ($6.8 million), making the Cameroonian banker one of the richest investors on the Nigerian Exchange.
