Afua Kyei is the Chief Financial Officer of the Bank of England. She is the Executive Director for the Finance Directorate, responsible for Strategy, Finance, Performance and Tax.
Afua is a Director of the Bank of England Asset Purchase Facility Fund, Alternative Liquidity Facility and Covid Corporate Facility Fund. She is also a member of the Real Time Gross Settlement System Renewal Executive Board, which provides governance and oversight over the upgrade of Critical National Infrastructure, which processes over £720bn payments each day.
Afua oversees the financial governance of the Bank’s balance sheet, which at its peak, grew to over £1 trillion during the Covid pandemic. She is co-executive sponsor for Diversity and Inclusion and Climate change. Afua is a Bank ambassador domestically and internationally. She was awarded CFO of the Year 2021 by the Women in Finance Awards UK. She was also honoured on the Powerlist 2023.
Afua joined us from Barclays Bank where between 2012-2019, where she was the Chief Financial Officer Mortgages and held Finance Director roles in the Investment Bank and Group Operations and Technology. She played a key role in Barclays’ strategic cost transformation program, TRANSFORM, and was an ambassador for diversity and inclusion for Group Finance Director functions.
Prior to that, she was a Corporate Financier at UBS (2007-2012) in Mergers and Acquisitions, Group Strategic Advisory, and was an Investment Banker in the Financial Institutions Group covering UK, Benelux, Central and Eastern Europe. She was part of the team that helped advise RBS during the financial crisis in relation to its divestments mandated as part of EU State Aid remediation, its participation in HM Treasury’s £282bn Asset Protection Scheme and its capital issuance of £33.5bn to HM Treasury.
Afua qualified as a Chartered Accountant (ICAS) with Ernst & Young. She read Chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford University (2000-2004) and graduated with a Master’s degree. She was awarded a Junior Research Fellowship by Princeton University in Organic Chemistry.
Afua Kyei, was named in the 2023 list of 100 Most Reputable Africans. The list by Reputation Poll International (RPI), a leading global reputation firm, named nine other Ghanaians working in the areas of governance, entertainment, human rights/advocacy, education and business.
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The other Ghanaians include Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, the chancellor of the Women’s University in Africa, and Eric Yirenkyi Danquah, a professor of plant genetics at the West Africa Centre for Crop Improvement (WACCI) in Accra.
Others are Dag Heward-Mills, the founder and bishop of the Lighthouse Chapel International; Edward Enninful, OBE, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue; Ken Kwaku, the honorary consul of Ghana to Tanzania; and Kofi Tutu Agyare, managing partner at Nubuke Investments.
The remaining three are Lucy Quist, the managing director of Morgan Stanley Ghana, Samuel Esson Jonah, the chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, and Theresa Ayaode, the executive director of the Multiple Concepts Group.