Alejandro Betancourt López and West Africa’s Banking Gap
About 1.3 billion adults still have no account with a bank or mobile-money provider, even after ownership rose to 79% of adults worldwide from 74% in 2021, according to the World Bank’s Global Findex 2025.
Alejandro Betancourt López has worked on that gap through BDK Financial Group, a Luxembourg-based holding company behind banks in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. He described himself in 2023 as one of the group’s original founders and investors, and said that he and his partners put heavy effort into the banks in their first years.
The Account Gap
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, 40% of adults had a mobile-money account in 2024, up from 27% in 2021, and 75% of adults in low- and middle-income economies now hold an account of some kind.
Côte d’Ivoire, the second market Alejandro Betancourt López’s group entered, shows how thin traditional banking was a few years earlier. Only 19.6% of people there had a bank account in 2017, even though bank accounts had grown from 2.5 million in 2014 to 3.3 million. Branches rose from 626 in 2016 to 712 in 2017, and the country had 1,004 ATMs.
Ivorian mobile-money accounts climbed to 11.4 million by June 2018, from 7.3 million three years earlier, and a broader inclusion measure that counts mobile money rose from 34% to 41% between 2014 and 2017, according to Global Findex figures cited by Oxford Business Group.
Alejandro Betancourt López’s Route From Dakar to Abidjan
BDK has operated as Banque de Dakar in Senegal since 2015. Its second bank and Alejandro Betancourt López’s first outside Senegal, Banque d’Abidjan, received a banking license in Côte d’Ivoire in 2017 and runs as a joint venture with La Poste de Côte d’Ivoire, the national postal operator. It opened ahead of Senegalese lender BRM, which entered the Ivorian market in February 2018, in a country that holds more than 31% of the regional banking market. Banks across the West African Economic and Monetary Union grant only about 15,000 new mortgage loans a year.
Alejandro Betancourt sees the opportunity in services that people in richer countries take for granted. “I know Africa’s growing on a huge pace,” he said. “You can create the demand by providing a service that sometimes doesn’t exist.” “Everything is there to be constructed,” he said of the services gap, adding that emerging markets offer “a huge reward for those providers” who bring those services in. He also said bankers with long industry careers run BDK’s day-to-day operations, which he follows through its board and reporting, and that the group’s business plan was proceeding as presented to investors.