One of the most striking trends in world banking is the emergence of a new middle class in nations such as India and, increasingly, China.

Eric Aouani, the chief executive of MediCapital Bank (MCB), is hoping that something similar will happen in Africa, where his bank is well placed to take advantage of this. MCB is a new bank with pan-African ambitions, based in London and given the necessary regulatory approval to operate by the Financial Services Authority in May 2007.

On the board are a number of heavy hitters from the banking world, including Stanislas Yassukovich, formerly of Merrill Lynch, and Bernard Asher, who has chaired HSBC Investment Bank. It is owned by Banque Marocaine du Commerce Extérieur (BMCE), which itself has retail operations in 15 African countries. One of Mr Aouani's ambitions is to use this to provide sophisticated wealth management to an emerging African middle class.

“We've a network on the ground,” he says. “We know people have money. We can see a doctor in Bamako [the capital of Mali], we know he's a real doctor and we know he's making money because he's one of the best doctors in the city.”

Western banks, with no such local network, are in danger of being used for money-laundering or other illicit deals. At the least, this requires a difficult process of checks and authorisation. “We can tell that the money is clean money,” Mr Aouani says.

This is part of plans for MCB that Mr Aouani, who was born in Casablanca 42 years ago and has worked for institutions such as Citibank and Cargill Financial Markets before joining BMCE at the end of 1998, freely admits are ambitious.

The bank's eventual aim is to advise on and finance projects across Africa, mainly concentrating north of the Equator at first, while bringing in investors from around the world to provide finance.

It is still early days. He says that MCB sits on three pillars. The first is a growing network of investment banks providing advice across Africa. Then there are three offices in London, Paris and Madrid that allow African financial institutions or corporates to raise equity or debt to fund investment. The third is a distribution network that will sell or place debt or equity raised by those African institutions through four financial centres. The first is Europe. The bank has applied for a banking licence in Dubai, to work at the new financial centre there. An Asian office will open next year, North America the year after or 2012.

All this against a backdrop of world recession, a risk-averse banking culture and a continuing distrust of emerging markets such as Africa. “It's ambitious,” he says, “but Africa will continue to grow. There is a crisis, but the growth in African GDP will be 3percent this year; in some countries it should still be around 5percent, [such as] Morocco, Tunisia, Libya.

“This is a picture of what we want MCB to be, a bridge between foreign commercial investors and the local corporations and financial institutions building projects in Africa. There's a need for a bridge. There's a need for ten bridges.”

He warms to the theme. “Twelve per cent of African roads are paved. If you just create a network of roads connecting cities with populations of half a million or more, you are creating more than $250 billion in additional trade.” He is quoting figures from the African Development Bank. “Can you imagine $250 billion of additional trade just from connecting cities with more than half a million people? It's amazing.”

He adds: “There are funds available from the Middle East, China and India. Most of them find it very difficult to use channels other than state-to-state, government-to-government. This kind of business exists already.”

Indeed, the Chinese are already actively funding state projects, in return, generally, for a slice of the huge commodities unmined in Africa.

“The private channel for companies looking to invest in the private sector in Africa is still something that's not working well,” Mr Aouani says. In most African countries, decolonisation was followed by a state-down, controlled economy that was, at best, inefficient and, at worst, set those countries' development back decades. “Government-to-government is good, but you need to develop the private sector if you want to develop a country. I'm not saying it's more efficient. But you've got to do both. Now they are all trying to move, to shift from the state-owned model, the socialist model, to the market economy.”

To do so would require the replication of an economic revolution that took centuries in the West. And, meanwhile, investors will still run scared of regime change that brings a reversal of this, perhaps even outright renationalisation, I suggest. “It's still a risk,” Mr Aouani concedes. “It's a much lower risk than it used to be.”

The second concern for outside investors is corruption. “”My perception is that there is corruption in all the countries in the world, in all the emerging markets in the world,” he says. “In any country you can find good partners to work with. You can't say it doesn't exist, but we can do business in Africa without facing corruption issues.”

As to the turmoil in banking, Mr Aouani says that this has helped his bank. “It's a very unusual statement, but the crisis helped us. It meant less competition. Most of the foreign banks allocated less capital to Africa.”

His business model, which mixes investment banking advice with corporate banking that enables access to capital, is an unusual one in Africa, where foreign banks generally restricted themselves to providing advice. Meanwhile, returns on investment grew as margins and spreads increased.

MCB expects to be profitable on a monthly basis by September, after only 18 months of full operation. “Without the crisis it would have probably have taken more than that,” he says. “It helped us because we started at the bottom and we didn't have a portfolio of toxic assets.”

It is hard to know how to react to this relentlessly positive outlook. But Mr Aouani can point to $800 million of actual assets built up so far, on or off the balance sheet, in more than 20 countries, by MCB and its parent bank. These are mainly in oil, infrastructure and in serving commodity markets, such as cotton. They include floating oil storage in Nigeria, telecoms in Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso and an airport in Dakar, Senegal.

MCB employs nearly 200 people, 80 at the London HQ opposite St Paul's Cathedral. Mr Aouani hopes to see this grow to between 600 and 800. By that stage, he hopes to have a fully fledged banking network serving that emerging African middle class on the ground.

All this will happen in parallel with the creation of six main investment banking hubs in Africa and the distribution network in Asia, the Middle East and North America. He says: “I agree it's an ambitious plan. But I think there's a need for it.”

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