CBAO Bank headquarters at the Place de l'Indépendance, Dakar, January 2008.
The Compagnie Bancaire de l'Afrique Occidentale (CBAO, lit.'Banking Company of West Africa') is a bank headquartered in Dakar, Senegal. With a history going back to the establishment of the Banque du Sénégal in 1853, it was purchased in November 2007 by Morocco-based Attijariwafa Bank.[1]
Overview
In 1989, the Senegalese operations of the Banque Internationale pour l'Afrique Occidentale were liquidated into several private institutions, with a majority share of the largest going to the Senegalese-owned Mimran Group.[2] These were reorganized in 1993 as the CBAO, with its equity held by the Mimran Group (75 percent), other local private shareholders (16 percent), and the Senegalese government (9 percent).[3]
In 2007, the Moroccan Attijariwafa bank bought a majority stake of the CBAO.[4] As of December 2007, the CBAO had a capitalisation of 11 billion, 450 million CFA Francs. Attijariwafa bank owned 79.15%, 9% was retained by the government of Senegal, and 12% was held by other private investors.[5] In 2008, CBAO absorbed the previously existing Attijari Bank Senegal,[6] also majority-owned by Attijariwafa Bank and which had absorbed the country's fifth-largest bank, Banque sénégalo-tunisienne (BST), in 2006.[7]
CBAO operates as a private retail and commercial bank entirely within Senegal.[8] As part of the Attijariwafa Bank Group, it also opened operations of its own in Burkina Faso in 2011, Niger in 2013, and Benin in 2015.[9]: 11
