Ecobank Ghana appoints Joana Mensah as Acting MD
Ecobank Ghana, has announced Ms. Joana Mensah as the acting Managing Director. She replaces Dan Sackey, who headed the bank from 2016 to August 15, 2023, when he officially retired.
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Ms. Joana Mensah is expected to remain in this role until a substantive person is named later. The bank is yet to announce the timeline for the appointment of a substantive MD.
Until this appointment, Ms Mensah was the Country Chief Risk Officer of Ecobank Ghana, responsible for managing the enterprise-wide risk functions across the bank since May 2019.
In this capacity, she had direct supervision of credit risk, market risk, operational risk as well as Environmental Social and Governance, and worked through the Management Risk Committee to cover other risk areas.
Her career with Ecobank Ghana started in August 1993, when she joined the bank as a Financial Analyst with the Corporate Banking Department.
SME portfolio
She subsequently served as a Relationship Manager in charge of the SME Portfolio and was eventually appointed as the Head of Commercial Banking in 1999.
In 2005, Ms Mensah Joana was appointed as Country Risk Manager with dual responsibility as the Regional Risk Manager for the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), which is currently the Anglophone West Africa (AWA) region.
Based on her rich credit experience and expertise in exercising sound credit judgment, she was also appointed as Senior Credit Officer by Ecobank Transnational Inc., the parent company of Ecobank Ghana, responsible for approving large credit exposures and high-risk exposures for the AWA Region. She has a strong background in SME development, Corporate Banking/ Strategy and Risk Management.
The Acting MD holds an MBA in Finance and a BSc. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Ghana, Legon. She presently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Ecobank Gambia and previously served on the Boards of Ecobank Sierra Leone and Ecobank Ghana Venture Fund.
Financial performance
Ms. Mensah comes into office just as the bank has completely recovered from the dip in its financial performance, unavoidably caused by the effects of Ghana’s Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP), which imposed a significant adverse impact on nearly all banks.
Ecobank Ghana, for long the industry leader, announced its financial performance for the first half of 2023 that showed that it is well on course to successfully navigating the treacherous terrain thrown up by the country’s debt restructuring exercise.
The bank is back to profitability after impairment charges on its holding of government debt securities, leading to huge losses for both the full 2022 financial year and the first quarter of 2023.