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Coris Bank International Burkina Faso closed above 1,000 billion CFA francs in market value for the first time on Wednesday, Sept. 2, reaching roughly 1,040 billion francs, about $1.85 billion at 562.9 francs to the dollar.
The shares rose 6.19% that day to 32,500 CFA francs. They have gained 201.48% since the start of the year, making the bank founded by Burkinabè businessman Idrissa Nassa the best-performing banking stock on the Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières, the regional exchange in Abidjan that serves the eight countries sharing the West African CFA franc.
The rise puts Coris third among banks listed there and fifth across all sectors.
The scale of the move is easier to see over a longer period. The shares traded at about 7,585 CFA francs five years ago. They now trade at more than four times that. Even against May, when the bank was worth 662.4 billion francs, the value has risen roughly 57% in three months.
Results published on Monday, Aug. 31 explain part of it. Coris reported first-half profit of 42 billion CFA francs, about $74.6 million, up 24% on the same period last year.
Nassa built the bank in Burkina Faso, a landlocked country of about 23 million people, and it has become one of the larger banking groups in francophone West Africa. He controls it through Coris Holding, which held 70% of the listed entity in 2016 and 63.6% by 2024, and the exchange records a free float of 132.5 billion francs, implying that roughly 80% of the equity is closely held.
The 1,040 billion CFA francs measures the Burkina Faso entity alone. Coris Holding, the parent Nassa controls, is considerably larger and is not listed.
That wider group holds more than $9 billion in assets across Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Guinea, Chad, Niger, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and takes close to a tenth of the banking market in the eight-country West African monetary union.
It has been expanding hard in both directions. Coris bought Société Générale's Chadian business in December 2024 as the French bank retreated from Africa, renaming it Coris Bank International Tchad and taking 67.8%. That gave it a licence inside CEMAC, the six-country Central African bloc, where a rule change effective Jan. 1, 2025 lets a bank authorised in one member state open branches in the others. It has since incorporated a Cameroonian subsidiary in Douala with share capital of 26 billion CFA francs and is moving toward the Central African Republic and Gabon.
The financing has followed. Coris Holding signed an €80 million facility with the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development in August for food, energy and agricultural lending, part of €150 million from that lender, and committed in the same month to mobilise 400 billion CFA francs for four hospitals and 27 schools in Burkina Faso.
What the market has repriced is a bank that was worth a fraction of this a year ago and now sits among the largest companies on the regional exchange.
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