Posted: 2010-02-25 23:58 Island bank comes to SA  Presenter: Semeyi Zake Guest(s): James Benoit Summit TV speaks to James Benoit chief executive of AfrAsia a bank that’s just touched down in South Africa from Mauritius to announce the start of their regional expansion drive into Africa Semeyi Zake: Welcome to Business IQ. James Benoit is chief executive of Mauritius registered AfrAsia - a bank that’s just announced the start of an African regional expansion drive. James, how big is this bank? James Benoit: AfrAsia bank is quite new - we are three years old. We are a boutique corporate and private bank headquartered in Mauritius. We are part of the single largest conglomerate in Mauritius by turnover or asset size in the region and we also have shareholders here in South Africa and Singapore so we are a growing regional corporate and private bank. Semeyi Zake: You were founded in Mauritius? James Benoit: Correct, we are headquartered and founded in Mauritius. We are now ready to expand more into the continent and other places… Semeyi Zake: Looking at that expansion why now? What opportunities have presented themselves? James Benoit: What we like is we think there’s an emerging story in Africa that’s still a bit unloved and unknown. We look at countries like Angola with rocketing growth in the past few years and still 7% GDP growth for all of Africa forecast this year. Those are the kind of numbers Asia has seen for the past decade or so. Asia is well established in many ways as an investor market - we think the African perspective is still to be told and will be discovered in due course. Semeyi Zake: You talk about Africa becoming increasingly integrated economically with Asia - your thoughts on that? James Benoit: If you look at the amount of investment going in from mining and minerals - even agriculture or telecommunications - those are big substantial businesses that require a lot of capital spending. Those produce spin-off businesses and other kinds of satellites and business eco systems for lack of a better word which means that the growth is truly becoming a lot more commercial and is moving away from preference or aid and we think that means that it’s quite sustainable. We think that provides pretty good foundations for what we call core banking activities in many countries across the continent… Semeyi Zake: Your backers include Singapore and you also have ties with India - how is this likely to help with your expansion? James Benoit: Good question. With our ties in India AfrAsia Bank has got what we call foreign institutional investor licence in partnership with the largest bank in India call ICICI so we can offer investors a one stop source for brokerage, custody and foreign exchange if they want to make investments into India. That might be very interesting for South Africans who are also investing back and forth to India… Semeyi Zake: It’s a growth market for the continent? James Benoit: We think increasingly a lot of exports particularly for South Africa are going into China. We also know India is increasingly a source of foreign direct investment and trading into South Africa so we do see quite a nice parallel with quite a lot of trading opportunities between South Africa and India as we go forward. Semeyi Zake: Your initial focus as you say is South Africa - where will you look to from here? James Benoit: We want to be a little bit humble in what we know and what we don’t know. Our group is well established in terms of trading operations across East and Southern Africa so I would suspect the next big moves for us will be continuing along Southern and East Africa. Semeyi Zake: There’s a lot of interest in Nigeria - are you hoping to get in there? James Benoit: There’s a lot of interest - but I have to say that we would look to consolidate our operations here probably making another investment in a corporate finance boutique in South Africa in the coming months. We will consolidate what we know here and use that as we go forth across the continent… Semeyi Zake: Any specific challenges that you’ve identified on the continent in terms of banking particularly from a business perspective? James Benoit: Some of the challenges would still be in terms of maybe regulations that change -and there’s the usual aspects of some political uncertainty. I guess from my perspective I’ve seen a lot of those kinds of challenges in South East Asia. What we try to do is make sure we work with good partners. Our partnership with our private equity firm which owns part of our bank is based here in South Africa. We look for good partners to help us mitigate risk and understand some of those regulatory and other challenges in the market. Semeyi Zake: What will you be doing differently from the other banks that we know of? James Benoit: I think what we offer is an ability to facilitate trade and investment across the region. For a lot of companies that are investing between here and say India and South East Asia and vice versa coming here Mauritius and AfrAsia Bank is very good at facilitating trade mergers and acquisitions or investment opportunities. We do that from a regional perspective and I think that’s where we like to call ourselves as a bank different. Semeyi Zake: Your sense of the banking environment here in South Africa from a person outside looking in? James Benoit: Very competitive and very developed. We are here setting up our office but obviously we wouldn’t pretend that we could come in here and be a mainstream bank at this stage. We are still trying to make sure we understand what are the competitive niches? I do think the banks that are here are well established and very big so we’re looking here to understand the market better and then we will make decisions whether we could compete on certain issues or on a broader basis as we go forward. I have immense respect for the competitive landscape of banking already here in South Africa. Printing? Please think of the environment. www.summit.co.za Transcripts: 082 962 2772 mvr/met Comments Related to this transcript: Comment on this transcript... Name : Email : Comments :