Burkina Faso tycoon Idrissa Nassa's Coris Holding secures $86.7 million from BIDC to boost small business lending

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Coris Holding, the pan-African banking group founded by Burkinabe billionaire Idrissa Nassa, has secured an €80 million ($86.7 million) credit line from the West African Development Bank, known by its French acronym BIDC, to expand its capacity to lend to small and medium-sized enterprises across the region.

The facility, equivalent to approximately 51 billion CFA francs, was approved during BIDC's 98th ordinary board session. It is designed to strengthen Coris Holding's ability to extend credit to small and medium enterprises, a segment that represents more than 70 percent of the group's total loan portfolio.

The scale of Coris Holding's commitment to small business lending has become the defining feature of its growth strategy across the eight-country UEMOA economic bloc. While many West African banks have concentrated lending toward larger corporate clients and sovereign debt, Coris has built its loan book primarily around smaller enterprises, a segment that is more labour-intensive to underwrite but that development finance institutions consistently identify as the most effective channel for job creation and broad-based economic growth.

BIDC's decision to extend the facility reflects the growing confidence regional development institutions have placed in Coris Holding as the bank has expanded across West Africa over the past decade. The institution's willingness to channel capital through Coris rather than direct lending programmes of its own signals a judgment that the bank's distribution network and underwriting capacity make it a more efficient mechanism for reaching small businesses than BIDC could achieve independently.

The BIDC facility is the latest in a series of development finance commitments to Coris Holding in 2026. The group separately is negotiating a $45 million joint facility with Vista Bank for small business lending in Senegal, and Coris Bank International Chad is finalising a $10 million trade finance guarantee facility with the International Finance Corporation, expected to go before the IFC's board on June 30. In October 2025, Coris secured €100 million ($115.7 million) in co-investment from Mediterrania Capital Partners and a consortium of European development finance institutions including FMO, British International Investment and BIO.

Nassa founded Coris Bank International in Burkina Faso in 2008 with initial capital of approximately $3 million. The group has since grown into one of West Africa's largest banking institutions, with assets exceeding $9 billion and operations spanning Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Togo, Benin, Mali, Guinea, Chad, Niger, Guinea-Bissau and, since January 2026, Cape Verde, where Coris Holding raised its stake in Banco Comercial do Atlântico, the island nation's largest bank, to 62.25 percent. Coris Bank posted a 22 percent rise in net profit in the first quarter of 2026, continuing a multi-year run of consistent double-digit growth.

The expansion has been driven by a combination of organic growth and the acquisition of distressed or divesting international bank operations, including Standard Chartered's retail business in Côte d'Ivoire in 2023 and units previously operated by Société Générale. Coris has also filed applications to enter Cameroon and Gabon, signalling an ambition to extend its UEMOA-zone dominance into the neighbouring CEMAC region.

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