Gaborone and Lusaka are the unlikely settings for a battle between one of the world's most famous investment bankers and his former firm over the future of African banking.
American banker Bob Diamond last week unveiled plans to raise $400 million to double the war chest of his African venture Atlas Mara and set him up to buy more banks.
This was just five days after Barclays, the British bank where Diamond was chief executive before he was ousted in 2012, announced the dismantling of the investment bank he built up and pinpointed Africa as one of its two main growth engines.
The prize both are chasing is sub-Saharan Africa's mostly unbanked 1 billion population and the companies there looking for capital to grow.
Economies are growing on average at 5-7 percent a year, the fastest expansion in a generation, offering lucrative returns for lenders who get it right.
“It's ripe for entry,” said Keith Jefferis, a former deputy governor at Botswana's central bank and now managing director at Econsult, a consultancy in Botswana's capital Gaborone.
“If you operate efficiently and pick up market share then potentially it's a very profitable strategy, but there is a lot of fragmentation. Each country has different systems so it's very management intensive, but openings are there.”
Diamond has already bought a platform in Botswana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Rwanda.
Barclays wants to be a top three bank in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Botswana and Zambia and also operates in seven other countries.
New technology, in particular a mobile banking boom, should help banks spread further and reach more customers at far lower cost than in the past.
