The Central African Securities Exchange (Bvmac) is moving slowly. Barely seven companies are listed on it. Bange Bank will be the first bank listed on this market of 54 million people.

The Central African Securities Exchange (Bvmac), based in Douala, is preparing to welcome its first bank. Indeed, the Director General of Bvmac, Louis Banga Ntolo, received on August 9, 2022 in a working visit, a delegation led by the Director General of the Equatorial Guinean bank, Bange, Juan Pablo Obiang Bikie. “This visit was part of the finalization of the process of listing Bange Bank,” we learn from Invest in Cameroon.

On this occasion, the two general managers discussed the listing process, the information obligations that fall to issuers of listed securities and the mechanism of endowment of the African Development Bank in favor of companies that decide to be listed at the Bvmac. This suggests that Bange has ambitions to boost the volume of its activities. As proof, this bank proceeded, last July 29, to the increase of its capital from 20 to 56 billion FCFA. And since 2021, it has officially extended its network outside Equatorial Guinea by opening a subsidiary in Cameroon.

If the Equatorial Guinean bank goes through with the process, it will be the first time ever that a bank from the sub-region enters the CEMAC stock exchange. So far, only a few agribusiness or insurance companies have done so in a context where the stock market culture is still embryonic. Sometimes there is no activity at all on the stock market for weeks at a time.

For the time being, the stock market continues to wait for certain countries in the sub-region to keep their commitment to its revitalization. These include Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Chad. These countries, according to the Central African Financial Market Supervisory Commission (Cosumaf), have promised since 2020 to list about five or six companies each on the stock market. But they have not done so to date.

By SA