Few have benefited as much from Angola’s decade-long oil boom as the country's banks. Their rise has been startling. Having held just $3bn of assets in 2003, in the wake of the country’s destructive civil war, the banking sector had total assets of about $45bn at the end of 2011. It is now the fifth biggest banking industry in Africa, behind only those in South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria.
Banks’ profits have also been spectacular. The nine Angolan lenders in The Banker Database’s latest African rankings made aggregate returns on assets of 3.3% in 2010, one of the highest levels on the continent. And many of them made returns on equity of more than 35%. “Any visitor to Angola today can see the fast pace of modernisation under way, and the financial sector has been capable of responding efficiently to the country’s robust economic and social growth,” says José Reino da Costa, chief executive of Millennium Angola, which is controlled by Portugal’s BCP.
