West Africa’s Biggest Small Business Lender Receives €80m to Expand

By Kekeletso Nkele, small.news Assistant

(small.news) — Coris Holding, the pan-African banking group founded by Burkinabe billionaire Idrissa Nassa, has secured an €80 million ($86.7 million) credit line from the West African Development Bank, known by its French acronym BIDC, to expand lending to small and medium-sized enterprises across the region, reports Billionaires Africa.

The facility, valued at approximately 51 billion CFA francs, was approved during BIDC’s 98th ordinary board session and is designed to strengthen Coris Holding’s ability to extend credit to smaller enterprises, a segment that already accounts for more than 70% of the group’s total loan portfolio.

A Deliberate Bet on the Underserved

Coris Holding’s commitment to small business lending has become the defining feature of its growth strategy across the eight-country UEMOA economic bloc. While many West African banks have concentrated their portfolios around larger corporate clients and sovereign debt, both less risky and easier to underwrite at scale, Coris has deliberately built its loan book around smaller enterprises. Development finance institutions consistently identify this segment as the most effective channel for job creation and broad-based economic growth, even as most commercial lenders remain reluctant to serve it.

BIDC’s decision to extend the facility reflects the confidence regional development institutions have placed in Coris Holding as the bank has expanded across West Africa over the past decade. The institution’s willingness to channel capital through Coris rather than through its own direct lending programs signals a judgment that the bank’s distribution network and underwriting capacity make it a more efficient mechanism for reaching small businesses than BIDC could achieve independently.

Part of a Broader Wave of Development Finance Commitments

The BIDC facility is the latest in a series of development finance commitments to Coris Holding in 2026. The group is separately negotiating a $45 million joint facility with Vista Bank for small-business lending in Senegal, and Coris Bank International in Chad is finalizing a $10 million trade-finance guarantee facility with the International Finance Corporation, expected to go before the IFC’s board on June 30.

In October 2025, Coris secured €100 million ($115.7 million) in co-investment from Mediterrania Capital Partners and a consortium of European development finance institutions, including FMO, British International Investment, and BIO. These commitments signal that Coris has become a trusted conduit for development capital across a regional banking landscape where reliable SME-focused operators are scarce.

From $3 Million to $9 Billion

Nassa founded Coris Bank International in Burkina Faso in 2008 with an initial capital of approximately $3 million. The group has since grown into one of West Africa’s largest banking institutions, with assets exceeding $9 billion and operations spanning Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Guinea, Chad, Niger, Guinea-Bissau, and since January 2026 Cape Verde, where Coris Holding raised its stake in Banco Comercial do Atlântico, the island nation’s largest bank, to 62.25%.

Coris Bank posted a 22% rise in net profit in the first quarter of 2026, continuing a multi-year run of consistent double-digit growth.

An Expansion Strategy That Keeps Moving

The group’s expansion has been driven by a combination of organic growth and the acquisition of distressed or divesting international bank operations, including Standard Chartered’s retail business in Côte d’Ivoire in 2023 and units previously operated by Société Générale. Coris has also filed applications to enter Cameroon and Gabon, signaling an ambition to extend its UEMOA-zone dominance into the neighboring CEMAC region.

For West Africa’s small business community, the trajectory matters as much as the individual deal. Each new facility, market entry, and development finance partnership extends the reach of a banking group whose core business is the lending that the rest of the regional banking sector has long treated as too difficult, too costly, or too small to bother with.