Afua Kyei is the Bank’s Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director responsible for Finance, Strategy, Performance, and Tax. She joined in June 2019 and has been at the core of the Bank’s leadership and decision making. Afua oversees the financial governance of the Bank’s balance sheet, which at its peak, grew to over £1 trillion during the Covid pandemic. Afua is a Director of the Bank of England Asset Purchase Facility Fund, Alternative Liquidity Facility, and also the Covid Corporate Financing Facility, prior to the cessation of its activities, and helped operationalise the Energy Markets Financing Scheme. She is a member of the Bank’s Executive Board overseeing the upgrade of the UK’s Real Time Gross Settlement System, Critical National Infrastructure, which processes over £720bn payments each day.
She is passionate about achieving better outcomes for society, and helping people. Afua seeks to pave the way for others through driving cultural changes within organisations. She is co-executive sponsor for Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) and co-executive sponsor for the Bank’s Climate Change disclosure. Afua is a key note speaker and represents the Bank in the Community, with Businesses and at international fora e.g. IMF, G20, COP.
Afua was awarded CFO of the Year 2021 by the Women in Finance Awards UK. She was in the Cranfield FTSE Board Report ‘100 Women to watch 2022’ and was a 2022 listee in the Kindness & Leadership, 50 Leading Lights UK campaign. She was honoured on the Powerlist 2023 ‘100 most influential Britons of black heritage’ and was also named in the ‘2023 list of 100 Most Reputable Africans’ by Reputation Poll International.
Afua joined the Bank from Barclays Bank (2012-2019) where she was the Chief Financial Officer Mortgages and played a key role in Barclays’ strategic cost transformation program, TRANSFORM, whilst in the Investment Bank and in Group COO. She was a D&I ambassador, while at Barclays.
During the Global Financial Crisis, she was an Investment Banker at UBS (2007-2012) in the Financial Institutions Group and in Mergers and Acquisitions, Group Strategic Advisory. 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. Prior to that, Afua qualified as a Chartered Accountant (ICAS) with Ernst & Young, where she worked in Mergers and Acquisitions and Banking & Capital Markets Audit.
Afua read Chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford University (2000-2004) where she was selected to be a member of Professor Sir Jack Baldwin’s research group; her Organic Chemistry research on the creation of anti-tumorous molecules using Organic Synthesis was published. She graduated with a Master’s degree and was also awarded a Junior Research Fellowship by Princeton University in Organic Chemistry.