Sangeetha Ramkelawon, Deputy CEO, BCP Bank Mauritius, takes a deep dive into subjects as diverse as how the island nation is poised for structuring investments into Africa by Asian investors, the role played by the BCP Group in developing the Mauritius-Morocco partnership and the opportunities posed by the Free Trade Agreement between India and Mauritius.

Edited excerpts from an exclusive interview:

Present in over 30 countries, with a majority of African economies, what are the opportunities the BCP Group is seeing in terms of the demand for African investments? What role is Mauritius expected to play in this?

Mauritius calls itself the crossroad between Asia and Africa. For many years we have been the springboard to promote investments towards India. Then, close to a decade ago, we started talking about Africa. So BCP’s strategy for BCP Bank (Mauritius) is to really leverage the ties that Mauritius has with Asia, and to see to what extent we can connect our presence in Africa with Asian investors or Asian traders that want to get into the continent.

On the investment side, we have structured a number of transactions with the support of the group. As a bank in Mauritius with a presence for over 15 years whose primary focus was retail banking, we have transformed our business model since 2019 when we rebranded. We announced during our rebranding that BCP Bank (Mauritius)’ focus would now be on creating a synergy between Africa and Asia, and that we would direct our efforts towards developing international banking activities out of Mauritius. With this in mind, we have introduced trade finance as a key business segment to support global traders to use the Mauritius platform for their transactions in Africa or in Asia. Global Business is also a key driver for our organisation and our role is to support clients wishing to use Mauritius as a country of substance for expansion of their overseas activities.

This is followed by the private banking portfolio, which is one of the focus areas BCP wants to develop in Mauritius, with a view to providing private banking solutions to Africa.

On the domestic corporate banking side, we work with many key groups in Mauritius – in a preferred and selective approach and this is where we plan to provide ongoing support.

Concerning the Retail segment, we decided to go niche since 2019, by adopting a more targeted approach to retail banking.

Unfortunately, in 2020 we were hit by COVID-19, and this has delayed our plans for growth, but a lot of groundwork has already been done. A few significant business deals have materialised and today the group has great confidence in leveraging Mauritius as its springboard for investments outside of Morocco.

Could you tell us more about BCP Group’s plans to develop the Morocco-Mauritius partnership?

There are opportunities for Moroccans, or even West African investors, to use Mauritius as a platform and there are many solutions that can be structured via Mauritius. We should not forget that Mauritius has signed an MoU with Morocco, and, because there is a banking presence through BCP in Mauritius, the Bank of Mauritius (BOM) has also signed an MoU with the Bank Al Maghrib, the banking regulator in Morocco.

Accordingly, we engage with a number of local partners here to help us capture a few of these investments. Indeed, we are actively talking to management companies (MCs), among other stakeholders, to see how we can reinforce the Morocco-Mauritius partnership. We had placed a lot of emphasis on this during our conference “BCP unveils Morocco” in February, which generated a lot of queries from our colleagues in the sector on how to develop this partnership and how they should definitely go ahead with BCP Bank on this corridor.

Speaking of country-level cooperation, the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation and Partnership Agreement (CECPA) has recently been inked between India and Mauritius. How is BCP Bank poised to help its clients take advantage of the CECPA for structuring investments from India to Africa, using Mauritius as a base?

With or without CECPA, I think the opportunities with India were, and are, very well present there. As mentioned before, being part of BCP Group, we’ve seen interest from a trade finance perspective with India. We also have, through experience, worked with a number of funds that invest in India and we have the capabilities to facilitate foreign exchange or adapt trade finance solutions to clients in India. It is a country that we have visited as a bank for important gatherings, when we could travel. We actively engage with many banks in India, given the marked interest shown by Indian banks to work with banks in Mauritius, so we also have a well-developed banking network, and we have primarily seen a growing interest for trade finance. Having said that, the traditional FPI business has reduced, so we do not see many of them today, at least compared to the buzz a couple of years ago. Private equity investments still happen, but I think for us in Mauritius, the focus is towards Africa.

Indeed, as the only North and West African bank present in Mauritius, it is easy to see that the BCP Group is well poised to support investments from Asia, especially China and India, towards Africa. Based on your own experience, could you tell us what Asian investors eying African opportunities expect from their banking partner?

Asian investors are eyeing investment and trade opportunities in Africa, so we can offer adapted financial structuring and trade finance structuring out of Mauritius.

To elaborate, the first opportunity is investment in infrastructure, because Africa is a continent with plenty of opportunities. We know that the continent has a growing population and that there is a big need for infrastructure finance – be it in road construction, telecom, and microfinance. Historically, there has always been Asian interests in Africa, but it has been growing over the past few years. So, this is one area where Mauritius is well poised to serve, leveraging off the fund structuring expertise we possess.

The other opportunity is trade. If I take China, India, and Africa, these are the three parties that take part in trading activities around the globe, whether it is for agricultural commodities like rice, flour, and wheat, or metals such as steel and aluminum. Therefore, we must build this ecosystem for trade finance and if you make the effort to understand the needs of the client, you can structure an entity adapted to their requirements.

What would you say are some of the key advantages of using Mauritius as a financial services hub for Africa?

The classic reason for using Mauritius as a regional financial services hub is our track record that we have built over the last decades.

The second advantage is that we belong to Africa - in fact, it would be truer to say that we belong to both Asia and Africa, and that makes us doubly blessed.

The third advantage that Mauritius enjoys is its strong and resilient financial services sector. Despite being a tiny country dependent on the external economic environment, we have built a robust and enduring financial services sector – and all because we have a strong regulatory framework.

Finally, we have a fluently bilingual population and the right time zone to serve multiple geographies.