Africa Center Director J. Peter Pham is quoted by Ozy.com on Morocco as a financial hub:
Other Moroccan financial institutions are already well-established south of the Sahara, their investments concentrated in fellow former French colonies. Together, the country’s two main banks, Attijariwafa and BMCE, have one of the continent’s largest networks of retail banking holdings; their branches dot countries like Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast. Economic forecasters are betting banking will go gangbusters as more and more Africans move into the middle class and seek out services to manage newfound income. Maroc Telecom, meanwhile, is the market leader for cell phone service in French-speaking Africa, according to a new report by the Atlantic Council.
Morocco’s trade with sub-Saharan Africa still constitutes a small margin of the kingdom’s total exports, roughly 5 percent. But it’s grown over the last decade. The Moroccan government has negotiated a number of trade agreements on the continent, and has pacts with three of the continent’s major trade blocs in the works, says Peter Pham, the director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, a D.C.-based think tank.