Côte d'Ivoire: Trade Finance guarantees with Ecobank

Ecobank Group is one of the main pan-African banking groups. The bank came about through the will of African businessmen to establish a bank to support the economic growth of the continent. It started its activities by opening a first subsidiary in Togo in March 1988. It subsequently developed in West Africa in the 1990s (opening of subsidiaries in Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Burkina Faso).  

Ecobank is today an integrated regional commercial bank which employees over 14,800 people. It has over 847 branches and offices in 33 countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

With this project, Proparco allocates guarantees to confirming banks that are members of the program for documentary credits issued by Ecobank RCI, with a maximum amount of EUR 10m.

Ecobank RCI is the final beneficiary of the planned guarantee scheme: the subsidiary is held back in the development of its activity to finance trade finance operations as it faces difficulties in finding confirming banks for the documentary credits it issues.

This operation has a twofold interest: 

1- Has positive impacts on the country’s economy:

(i) Support for growth, particularly in the current macroeconomic and political context marked by the crisis related to the Covid-19 pandemic.

(ii) Increase in the resources available for issuing banks due to the reduction, made possible by the existence of a guarantee, of the level of collateral deposits they must constitute from confirming banks.

2- Is developing new partnerships: the guarantee operations can also be considered as a tool to establish business relations with new banking clients. These relations can subsequently be developed with other types of longer-term financing.