Kenny Fihla stepped onto the seventh floor of Absa Towers West in downtown Johannesburg as group chief executive officer on 17 June 2025. He's the sixth person to occupy that corner office in just six years. Since Maria Ramos stepped down in 2019 after a decade at the helm, South Africa's third-largest lender by assets has been caught in a revolving door of interim, acting and short-lived leaders.
Six chiefs. One bank. The people who deposit their wages there didn't get a vote on any of them.
Who Has the Power
The Africa Report's Top 300 Finance Champions ranking of pan-African banking groups tells you who sits where in the continent's financial hierarchy. Its own findings are blunt about how the growth happened: many African banks saw currencies, sovereign debt and recapitalisation inflate balance sheets in 2025. Bigger, in other words, because of money-printing arithmetic and government borrowing, not because of anything built for the people who use the banks.
The package even asks the question itself: "Many of Africa's banks got bigger in 2025. Did they get better?" The ranking doesn't pretend the answer is flattering. Another story in the package, headlined "300 Finance Champions: Nigerian banks sink, South African groups swim," says the ranking reveals who best navigated headwinds including tighter regulation, Sahel insecurity and negative savings rates.
Negative savings rates. Sit with that one. Ordinary savers watch their money lose value while the institutions holding it get ranked as champions.
Who Gets Crushed
The ranking's other findings cut deeper. Some of Africa's most profitable banks are running on thin capital. By posting strong returns on their equity, AFG, Attijariwafa Bank and Ecobank lead their peers across the continent, but this success often rests on a limited capital base, leaving their balance sheets more vulnerable to shocks.
Read that again. The profit looks spectacular precisely because the cushion is thin. When the shock lands, the report's own framing points to balance sheets that are more vulnerable. History shows where the cost of vulnerable banks usually ends up: with depositors, borrowers and taxpayers, not with the executives who collected the strong returns.
What They're Calling "Growth"
Then there's SanlamAllianz. The group, led by Hennie Nel, is aiming to double its profits by 2030, four years from now, powered by the growth of Africa's mass market. The mass market, to be clear, means the working people the insurer intends to sell to. Their wages are the raw material of the profit target.
The same group is cautious about its potential role as a catalyst for infrastructure financing on the continent. Profit doubling is the stated ambition. Roads, power and water get cautious language.
The Revolving Door Tells the Story
A bank that has burned through six chief executives in six years isn't suffering from a bad run of luck. It's showing what a top-down corporate structure looks like when the people at the apex are interchangeable and the institution grinds on regardless. Seven years after Maria Ramos left, the corner office on the seventh floor is still the prize and the problem.
The rankings will keep coming, the champions will keep being crowned, and the headlines will keep measuring size. Nobody in the package measures what the savers, the borrowers and the people on the wrong side of the teller window actually got.
- kenny fihla
- absa group
- top 300 finance champions
- african banks
- banking ranking
- sanlamallianz
- hennie nel
- maria ramos