Managing AI as capital allocation across 35 African markets, with Ecobank's Nvalaye Kourouma

Nvalaye Kourouma spent his early career at Coca-Cola, managing territory operations and brand strategy across 21 African countries, before he ever worked in banking. Today, he serves as Group Chief Digital Officer at Ecobank, the leading Pan-African banking group operating across 35 sub-Saharan markets and serving tens of millions of customers across consumer, commercial, and corporate banking. In 2025, Euromoney named Ecobank Africa's best digital bank. 

In this episode of Banking Reinvented, Nvalaye joins host Tim Rutten to make the case that when it comes to AI, the technology itself is already proven, viable, and out of the lab, so the "pilot" phase belongs to the organization, not the tool. Instead, he sees that AI is now a capital allocation decision, and the institutions still treating it as a pilot are behind the ones already treating it as a budget line. 

The conversation covers how Ecobank runs one digital strategy across 35 different regulators, currencies, and infrastructures on a single common platform; why most digital and AI transformations fail for governance reasons rather than technology reasons; and how AI is helping Ecobank reach customers who never qualified for a formal loan.

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