Our founder spent the first two decades of a career moving between European private banking and African markets: advising families from Libreville and Lagos out of Paris and Geneva, and structuring transactions on the continent for institutions that rarely set foot there. The two worlds spoke different languages, and clients paid the price of the translation.
The pattern was consistent. A family that had built an industrial group over thirty years would hold accounts with three private banks, property through two agencies that had never spoken to each other, and a tax position nobody owned. The international firms did not understand the continent. The local providers could not reach London, Paris or Dubai. Nobody held the whole picture, so nobody was accountable for it.
AfriOne was founded in Paris in 2014 to be the single office such families deserved: one senior relationship covering wealth, property, significant assets and the practical business of family life, with licensed professionals engaged wherever regulation applies. The head office went to Avenue Montaigne deliberately. Clients should be received in the city where much of their international life already happens.
From 2016 the firm built its African network office by office, Libreville and Douala first, then Dar es Salaam and Johannesburg, each opened only once there were client families in the region to justify it. Growth has followed clients, never the other way around.
The founder remains a working partner, not a figurehead. He takes first meetings personally, leads the firm's most significant mandates, and still travels between Paris and the African offices most months of the year.