Ghana: Joana Mensah Assumes Role of Acting Managing Director at Ecobank Ghana

Ecobank Ghana, the country’s largest commercial bank, has appointed Joana Mensah as the Acting Managing Director.

She takes over from Dan Sackey, who served as Managing Director from 2016 until his official retirement on August 15, 2023.

Ms. Mensah is set to remain in this position until a permanent Managing Director is named. Currently, Ecobank has not provided a timeline for this process or revealed the candidates being considered for the substantive MD role.

Before this appointment, Joana Mensah held the position of Country Chief Risk Officer at Ecobank Ghana since May 2019. In this role, she oversaw enterprise-wide risk functions, including credit risk, market risk, operational risk, and Environmental Social and Governance matters. She collaborated through the Management Risk Committee to address other areas of risk.

Her career with Ecobank Ghana began in August 1993 when she joined as a Financial Analyst in the Corporate Banking Department. Over the years, she assumed roles such as Relationship Manager for the SME Portfolio and eventually became the Head of Commercial Banking in 1999.

In 2005, Joana was appointed as Country Risk Manager, where she also took on the role of Regional Risk Manager for the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), now known as the Anglophone West Africa (AWA) region.

Due to her extensive experience and credit expertise, she was designated as Senior Credit Officer by Ecobank Transnational Inc., the parent company of Ecobank Ghana. In this role, she was responsible for approving significant credit exposures and high-risk exposures in the AWA Region.

Joana has a strong background in SME development, Corporate Banking/Strategy, and Risk Management. She holds an MBA in Finance and a BSc. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Ghana, Legon.

Currently, she serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Ecobank Gambia and has previously been on the Boards of Ecobank Sierra Leone and Ecobank Ghana Venture Fund.

Joana Mensah assumes her role at a time when Ecobank Ghana has fully recovered from the financial challenges posed by Ghana’s Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP), which had a significant adverse impact on nearly all banks in the country.

Ecobank Ghana, a long-time industry leader, recently announced its financial performance for the first half of 2023. The bank is on track to successfully navigate the challenges posed by the country’s debt restructuring exercise.

Despite being 19.3% lower than the previous year’s performance, Ecobank Ghana’s profit after tax for the first half of 2023 was GH¢282.429 million, marking a return to profitability after substantial losses due to impairment charges on government debt securities in 2022 and early 2023.

Joana Mensah’s immediate focus, as she assumes her role, will likely involve guiding the bank back to its historical growth trajectory to recover from the losses incurred during the DDEP.

With her impressive career achievements thus far, Joana Mensah appears well-prepared for the significant task ahead, aiming to maintain Ecobank’s market leadership and profit-making drive throughout 2023 or until the appointment of a permanent Managing Director.