ASINT / Finance & Institutions
On June 9, 2026, United Capital Group announced it had secured investment banking licences in both Ethiopia and Rwanda, taking its operational footprint to 12 African countries. The group becomes the first foreign institution licensed to provide investment banking services in Ethiopia, covering financial advisory, securities brokerage, and portfolio management. The Ethiopian licence, issued on June 5, 2026, followed months of regulatory review involving the Capital Market Authority, the Ethiopian Investment Commission, and other government institutions. United Capital will operate through a wholly owned local subsidiary, United Capital Financial Services PLC, making it the first foreign investment bank to establish a base in Addis Ababa. The Rwanda entry came shortly before, through regulatory approval from that country’s Capital Market Authority covering trust services, investment banking, and portfolio management. The two licences, secured within weeks of each other, are not coincidental timing. They reflect a deliberate sequencing in a continental expansion strategy that United Capital has been executing since entering the UEMOA zone in 2025.
The financial base from which this expansion is being funded is not speculative. For the 2025 financial year, gross revenue rose 35% to N58.55 billion, while profit after tax climbed 17% to N28.15 billion, and assets under management surpassed N2 trillion. The revenue growth was underpinned by a 176% surge in net trading income and a 59% rise in fee and commission income, with all seven subsidiaries returning to simultaneous profitability: Asset Management, Trusteeship, Securities, Investment Banking, Wealth Management, Microfinance Banking, and Consumer Finance. Momentum continued into 2026, with Q1 profit after tax surging 66% to N9.79 billion, supported by strong fee income, investment gains, and contributions from insurance associates. The group also served as lead arranger for the Federal Government domestic dollar bond and joint trustee in the Lagos State N230 billion bond issuance in 2025. These are not the credentials of a firm taking speculative bets on frontier markets. They are the balance sheet and deal track record of an institution that has earned the institutional credibility to seek regulatory approval in markets where that approval carries meaningful selection value.
The Ethiopia entry is the more structurally significant of the two. Ethiopia officially launched the Ethiopian Securities Exchange on January 10, 2025, ending more than half a century without a structured capital market. Proclamation 1248/2024 enabled the establishment of a well-organised Capital Market Authority and a public-private partnership held Ethiopian Securities Exchange, regulated by the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority. The Ethiopian Securities Exchange was formed in October 2023 as a share company, with Ethiopian Investment Holdings holding 25% and other domestic and foreign shareholders including the Trade and Development Bank Group, FSD Africa, and the Nigerian Stock Exchange holding the remaining 75%. The Nigerian Stock Exchange’s presence in the ESX ownership structure is not incidental: it reflects a deliberate architecture in which West African capital market infrastructure is being used to seed East African market development. United Capital’s licence entry follows and complements that structural relationship. In May 2026, the Economic Commission for Africa, the Ethiopian Capital Market Authority, and FSD Africa convened over 80 representatives from Ethiopia’s financial sector for the validation workshop of Ethiopia’s ten-year Capital Markets Master Plan, designed to build a deep, diversified, and trusted capital market capable of financing the country’s economic transformation. United Capital’s arrival in Addis Ababa is timed to the earliest operational phase of that ten-year arc.
On the regulatory side, the 2025 Banking Business Proclamation enables foreign banks to acquire up to a 49% stake in domestic financial institutions or establish wholly owned subsidiaries, while the FX Amendment Directive further liberalised the forex regime by allowing forward-exchange transactions, full foreign currency retention for service exporters, and a case-by-case approval regime for outward investment by Ethiopian entities. The capital market liberalisation and the banking sector opening are designed to work together, creating conditions for integrated financial institutions to operate across advisory, brokerage, and custody functions within a single regulatory perimeter. United Capital’s licence covers exactly that spectrum.
The Rwanda positioning serves a different but complementary function. Rwanda is not a large domestic market. Its population of approximately 14 million and its GDP are a fraction of Ethiopia’s scale. But United Capital’s management is positioning Rwanda as a business-friendly regional base with strong governance, ease of doing business, and operational flexibility. Rwanda’s Capital Market Authority has a track record of structured engagement with foreign financial institutions, and its regulatory environment provides a more tested operational framework than Ethiopia’s nascent exchange. The combination of the two licences creates an East African architecture: Rwanda as a regional hub with operational maturity, Ethiopia as the large-market growth bet requiring patient capital and capacity-building. The ECMA Director General stated that the greatest contribution expected from United Capital is not only financial capital, but also human capital and technical expertise. That framing places United Capital in a different category from a pure fee-seeking market entrant. It signals that the Ethiopian regulatory authority views the licence as a capacity transfer mechanism as much as a market access grant.
United Capital’s Director for Africa acknowledged that replicating the scale of the group’s Nigerian operations in East Africa in a short timeframe would be ambitious, given those capabilities were built over roughly 60 years, but said the opportunity set is compelling. The group expects its East and Central African businesses to be profitable within three to five years. That timeline is realistic for investment banking in early-stage capital markets. Deal flow in Ethiopia will initially come from privatisation mandates, infrastructure project finance, and bond issuances linked to the government’s financing programme — the same categories that generated United Capital’s lead arranger credentials in Nigeria. The pipeline logic is coherent. The execution risks, primarily FX liquidity, political stability in Ethiopia’s northern regions, and the pace at which the ESX develops secondary market depth, are real and documented.
The broader strategic reading connects to two threads running through this series. The first is the question of what Nigerian financial institutions do with the capital and credibility they have rebuilt during the post-devaluation recovery documented in the preceding article. United Capital’s answer is continental expansion using balance sheet strength earned in Nigeria to secure first-mover position in reforming East African markets, before those markets are competed for by South African, Gulf, or European institutions. The second thread is the Tulu Kapi financing structure in Ethiopia, where a 12% plus 5% state participation model positions Ethiopia as a country simultaneously opening its capital markets and asserting sovereign stakes in strategic sectors. An investment bank present in Addis Ababa from the earliest phase of capital market formation is better placed to advise on those structures than one that arrives after the market has been priced and allocated.
United Capital’s Group CEO framed the expansion in explicitly continental terms: “Our journey from Nigeria to Ethiopia, from Abidjan to Kigali, is a single pan-African strategy, built on the conviction that African capital, mobilised and structured through African institutions and regulated within African frameworks, is the most sustainable foundation for the prosperity of this continent.” The rhetoric is ambitious. The sequencing, from UEMOA zone entry in 2025 to dual East African licences in June 2026, with a financial base that returned 66% Q1 profit growth, is grounded. What the next three years will test is whether an investment bank built on Nigerian deal flow and naira-denominated earnings can generate comparable returns in birr and franc-denominated markets where the institutional infrastructure is still being constructed.