First HoldCo appoints new director to the board

First HoldCo Plc has named Gwen Mwaba as a non-executive director. This takes effect from 15 October after getting the green light from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

The bank made this announcement in a regulatory filing. Abiola Baruwa, the group company secretary, signed the notice on Thursday.

First HoldCo mentioned that the appointment follows the rules set by the Nigerian Exchange Limited (NGX) Rulebook.

According to the bank, Ms Mwaba has a lot of experience in corporate governance, credit risk, and banking strategies. She also knows a lot about capital deployment, structured trade, and commodity finance, as well as environmental and social governance issues in emerging markets.

Ms Mwaba has almost thirty years of experience in banking and development finance. She is skilled in credit risk oversight, corporate lending, and structured trade finance.

Before her current role, she was managing director of Trade Finance and Correspondent Banking at the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) in Cairo, Egypt.

In that position, Ms Mwaba led trade finance and structured credit activities throughout Africa and the Caribbean. She managed a portfolio worth $19.5 billion that included sovereign and corporate loans.

She was also part of the bank’s Pre-Credit and Credit Committees. Here, she made key decisions on major lending transactions and managed portfolio strategies and risk limits.

Before that, Ms Mwaba was the regional head for Anglophone West Africa at Afreximbank. She looked after the regional strategy and credit processes in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, The Gambia, and Cape Verde.

Earlier in her career, she was the executive vice president of Structured Trade and Commodity Finance at Standard Bank Plc in London. She handled complex commodity finance and export credit agency-backed deals across Africa.

Her banking experience also includes senior roles at Stanbic Bank Zambia and Standard Bank South Africa. She was head of Vehicle and Asset Finance and also head of Corporate Banking.

Ms Mwaba is also known in the industry for being on the editorial board of Trade Treasury & Payments. Recently, she served on the Multilateral Institutions Board Advisory Panel for the International Trade and Forfaiting Association (ITFA) and the World Trade Organization's Expert Group on Trade Finance.

She has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Heriot-Watt University in the UK. She also earned a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Applied Accounting from Oxford Brookes University in the UK.

Ms Mwaba is a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (FCCA) and has a qualification from the Chartered Institute of Transport.