Forbes Magazine
Mfonobong Nsehe, Contributor
Ismail Douiri
In the coming weeks, I will be interviewing members of the African Leadership Network(ALN), a membership community of Africa’s most dynamic and influential new-generation leaders. The ALN creates and strengthens relationships between these leaders to encourage intra-African trade, investment, and collaboration.
This week, I interview Ismail Douiri, co-CEO of Attijariwafa Bank, Morocco’s largest commercial bank.
Attijariwafa, which is listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange, has a market capitalization of $7.5 billion, assets in excess of $34 billion, a retail network of up to 3,000 branches, 15,000 employees and close to 5 million clients. Douiri has played a pivotal role in this bank’s remarkable success story. He speaks about his life experiences, provides some insights into Morocco’s financial sector and offers his thoughts on how African economies can accomplish inclusive growth.
What life experiences have influence your leadership style?
At the beginning of my career, I went through a very frustrating professional experience. It came right after another very positive and successful period with the same employer, on the same project, but with different managers. It made me realize how important it is to empower talented young employees and how much their performance is tied to their perception of being listened to, considered, and supported.
Another major experience was my MBA at Harvard Business School, where I was exposed to exceptional people who were all very different from me and from each other. I experienced first-hand the positive impact of diversity on performance and later adopted it as a managerial tool in order to achieve greater results.
Finally, meeting my WEF’s Young Global Leaders peers on a regular basis and having the opportunity to reflect, with their help, on my leadership skills has opened my eyes to the importance of using my own emotions and passions as well as those of my colleagues in situations where I tended to rely more on my brain and analytical skills.
What is the most rewarding and challenging aspect of your job?
The most rewarding part of my job is the lasting impact that Attijariwafa Bank can have on families, on businesses, and on its environment. I love being part of new projects aiming at entering new territories, or introducing new financing instruments that will bring value to people and help them realize their own dreams. I also love to contribute to broadening our community involvement through Attijariwafa Bank’s Foundation.
The most challenging is certainly the breadth of topics I need to handle on a daily basis: the subject matter, the objective, financial impact, the conceptual level involved, the people dynamics, these all vary considerably during the same day. What makes matters worse, is the permanent competition for very scarce resources, but this is why it is so interesting!
What might our readers be surprised to learn about the Moroccan banking/financial sector?
Do they know that Morocco’s banking sector, relative to its economy, is larger than South Africa’s? That the two largest Moroccan banks are each more than twice as large (in total assets) than the largest Nigerian bank? Over 62% of adults in Morocco have a bank account? The Casablanca Stock Exchange was founded in 1929, and, depending on cycles and currency movements has ranked between 2nd and 4th largest in Africa? Morocco has an impressive financial sector that not many know about.
Morocco has shifted its diplomatic and investment attention from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. What does this mean for you and Attijariwafa Bank?
I don’t think the word ‘shifted’ is the right word. Morocco has always been a place where civilizations and people meet. It is one thefew places in the world where, thanks to geography and history, people from different origins have visited, settled, invested and traded.
In the Middle Age, Morocco’s oldest university, Al Qarawiyyin, founded by a woman in 859 AD, welcomed students from Europe and Africa and helped spread, among other things the Greek philosophy and mathematics to the West.
Late King Hassan II used to say Morocco is a tree that has its roots in Africa and its leaves in Europe. Europe was, is, and will remain very important for Morocco and its economy.
Africa has always been very important for Morocco for historical, social, cultural, and religious reasons.The new element, since the early 2000s, is that it also became very important for economic reasons. With the rapid growth of African economies, many needs have emerged generating new opportunities for companies from all over the world. Moroccan companies have seized this opportunity early and were helped by the strong cultural proximity, a better understanding of the economic context, and a clear support from the national authorities.
Attijariwafa bank also invested early in neighboring African countries in order to better serve our existing clients and to benefit from the growth potential. We are now significant actors in 13 African markets. For me personally, this means I allocate a fair share of my time to M&A, strategy formulation, and Audit Committee/Board supervision of the existing subsidiaries.
Which leaders do you admire? Examples can be from the past or present and from any sector.
I’d rather list the qualities that I admire in leaders: listening skills, humility, vision, focus, an ability to connect ideas and inspire people and great communication skills. These qualities are present in many people around us but only bloom in a few of them. The reason why will remain a mystery!
What would you like Attijariwafa Bank to achieve in five years time? What recent accomplishments are you most proud of?
In service-oriented businesses, the mission of the company, the strength of its brand, the quality of its service, the loyalty of its customers are all intimately linked to employee empowerment and satisfaction. In 5 years time, I would love to be certain that all our employees feel and act as ambassadors of the company in everything they do!
The accomplishments I am most proud of are the sum of many individual steps made by this very big organization that come together and bring a better performance to all stakeholders: they range from a change in the branch IT system that makes life easier for 4000 employees every day, to a modern and flexible data warehouse that allows sophisticated big data analyses, now a necessary tool in the competitive landscape in Morocco. I am also proud thatgender diversity makes progress every day in our organization without the need for positive discrimination, and that some investors are now asking more intelligent and better-informed questions in the earnings conference calls.
Many recent conferences focused on Africa discuss “inclusive growth” and expanding prosperity to all Africans. How do you suggest this can be accomplished?
Answering this question or even attempting to do so would be too ambitious. What needs to be acknowledged is that growth is the key word here. Inclusive is just the description. My personal view is that the pursuit of economic growth, if coupled with the right governance principles : transparency, accountability, organized stakeholder communication (e.g. government-business-labor or government-NGO), and a safety net to prevent extreme poverty, leads to inclusive growth, a growth that will generate a middle-class better able to educate their children than their parents did for them.
Each country, or even each community, can reach that differently depending on its history, resources, skills, but I believe that those who end up achieving inclusive growth all share the principles listed above.
What does membership in the African Leadership Network mean to you?
I am new to ALN, but I felt immediately comfortable among this unique group of people. It is for me an opportunity to meet young African professionals who I wouldn’t have had a chance to meet otherwise. It is also much needed time to reflect on my actions and their impacts, and compare them to those of my African peers in order to learn and improve. The Annual Gathering in November provided me with a unique opportunity to interact with top decision-makers from host country Rwanda and have in-depth discussions about the opportunities their country offers and the challenges it faces.
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