Burkinabè banker Idrissa Nassa leads a business push into Nigeria after the ECOWAS split

Idrissa Nassa, the Burkinabè banker who founded Coris Bank International, led a business delegation into talks with Nigeria's embassy in Ouagadougou aimed at expanding trade and investment between the two countries, according to a statement released on Friday, Sept. 11.

Nassa attended as president of the General Confederation of Faso Enterprises, known by its French acronym COGEF, which is Burkina Faso's principal employers' organisation. He met Syndoph Endoni, Nigeria's ambassador to Burkina Faso.

The two sides said they would pursue cooperation across trade, investment, transportation, manufacturing, logistics and the digital economy. Nassa said COGEF would build an extensive economic partnership with Nigeria to significantly increase trade, and would work with Nigerian counterparts to identify commercially viable areas to work in.

Endoni said Nigeria was open to economic engagement with Burkina Faso and pressed for closer cooperation on moving goods and services across borders. He said work was under way to reactivate the Nigeria-Burkina Faso Bi-National Joint Commission, a government-to-government mechanism that has been dormant.

No agreements were signed, no figures were disclosed and no timeline was set.

The political backdrop nobody mentioned

The meeting carries weight because of what happened 20 months ago.

Burkina Faso formally left the Economic Community of West African States on Jan. 29, 2025, alongside Mali and Niger. The three military-led governments had announced their intention to withdraw a year earlier and rejected a six-month grace period that ECOWAS offered them, calling the decision irreversible. They now operate as the Alliance of Sahel States, with a joint military force, a common passport and plans for a regional investment bank.

Nigeria was on the other side of that argument throughout. President Bola Tinubu chaired ECOWAS during the crisis, the bloc is headquartered in Abuja, and relations soured after the July 2023 coup in Niger, when ECOWAS demanded the reinstatement of President Mohamed Bazoum and threatened military intervention.

ECOWAS asked its remaining 12 members to keep recognising the departing countries' passports and to continue trading with them. Free movement has largely held. What has not been rebuilt is the institutional machinery, which is what makes the reactivation of the bi-national commission and a direct channel between an ambassador and an employers' federation worth noting.

A private-sector conversation is also the route with the fewest political obstacles. Business delegations can meet and sign agreements without either government conceding anything about the withdrawal.

What Nassa brings to the table

Nassa is not a conventional business association figurehead. He runs the largest banking group to come out of Burkina Faso and one of the fastest-growing in francophone West Africa.

He started in 1984 trading bicycle parts and consumer goods across West African borders, and by 1990 had built one of the larger import and distribution operations in the subregion, moving rice, sugar and motorcycle parts. He took over the troubled Financière du Burkina and spent five years restructuring it, then converted it into a commercial bank. Coris Bank International opened in Ouagadougou in January 2008 with about $3 million in capital.

Coris Bank International Burkina Faso reached a market value of 1,040 billion CFA francs on Sept. 4, about $1.85 billion, after its shares rose 6.19 percent that day to 32,500 CFA francs. The stock has gained more than 200 percent this year, the best performance of any bank listed on the Bourse Régionale des Valeurs Mobilières in Abidjan. Five years ago the shares traded around 7,585 francs.

The listed Burkina Faso entity is only part of it. Coris Holding, the unlisted parent Nassa controls, carries a balance sheet of about 7,099 billion CFA francs, roughly $12.52 billion, making it one of the three largest banking groups in the West African Economic and Monetary Union alongside Ecobank. The group operates across Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Togo, Senegal, Benin, Niger, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, has moved into Chad, and has announced plans for the Central African Republic and Gabon. The wider Coris Group extends into insurance, telecoms, mining, real estate and manufacturing.

The market Coris does not serve

Nigeria is the obvious gap. It is West Africa's largest economy and its banking system is entirely outside the CFA franc zone where Coris has built its network, which means different currency, different regulator and different rules.

Coris has been expanding continuously for three years, and every new market it has entered has been either a CFA franc country or an adjacent one. Establishing commercial relationships with Nigerian businesses is a far cheaper way to reach that market than applying for a banking licence, and trade finance between Nigerian and Burkinabè companies would be the natural product.

Neither COGEF nor the embassy indicated whether Coris itself has any interest in operating in Nigeria.