The Caisse de Dépôts et Consignations du Cameroun is pushing hard, warning banks after receiving far less than the funds it’s supposed to centralize for 2025. And the gap is huge—big enough to rattle boardrooms and spark fresh tensions with regulators.
The shortfall, laid bare in new figures, leaves questions hanging in the air about compliance, liquidity priorities, and the balance of authority inside Cameroon’s financial system.
Mounting Pressure as Transfers Lag Far Behind Targets
The CDEC reported that by April 30, it had received only CFA83 billion of the CFA400 billion it expected for the year. That’s roughly a fifth of the target, a number small enough to feel uncomfortable for an institution built to manage public deposits safely and transparently.
Banks hold most of what’s missing.
Actually, the staggering part is that CFA250 billion was expected from the banking sector alone. Yet barely CFA44 billion has arrived.
One sentence says it all: the gap is more than CFA200 billion.
The concentration of effort among a few big players makes the picture uneven. BICEC leads with CFA13 billion, with SCB, Société Générale Cameroun, and Standard Bank trailing but still contributing meaningful amounts. These four institutions basically carry the load so far, showing how much the system still leans on its biggest members.
A smaller pack of banks has contributed, though not nearly at the levels required.
And then there are the minimal transfers from the tail end of the sector, like BGFIBank’s CFA42 million. That’s low enough that it reads more like a symbolic gesture.
Some of these contributions feel like drops in a bucket. Yet they also show that compliance, though uneven, is spreading in tiny steps across institutions.
A Growing Standoff With Afriland First Bank
This part of the story has raised eyebrows across the country’s financial sector.
Afriland First Bank, Cameroon’s largest privately owned bank by deposits, is at the center of a confrontation with the CDEC. The institution is reportedly being pressed to transfer more than CFA166 billion tied to public deposits, judicial escrow accounts, and consignments.
That’s a giant sum for any bank to release.
And honestly, the threat of forced recovery measures—collection notices, targeted seizures, on-site audits—adds a layer of tension that’s hard to ignore.
One-sentence pause. Afriland is a systemic institution.
As of December 31, 2024, the bank held CFA1 557 billion in deposits and nearly a quarter of the nation’s credit market. Going after a bank of that size sends a message with real weight. It signals that the CDEC is prepared to escalate, even if it shakes the sector.
The stakes feel even higher because the CDEC is preparing something new: its own banking subsidiary. The idea is simple on the surface—reduce dependence on commercial banks and take full control of public fund collection. But beneath that, there’s an unmistakable signal about long-term strategy.
Early Compliance Beyond the Banking Sector
While most attention is locked on the banks, some non-bank entities have already begun meeting their obligations.
The Société Immobilière du Cameroun transferred CFA482 million in February for housing guarantee deposits.
Insurance companies, bailiffs, the Treasury, and microfinance institutions have made smaller payments that help build up the CFA83 billion total reported by April.
One sentence here. Their contributions are small but significant in shaping broader compliance.
Still, the broader question sticks: will the biggest laggards make their transfers before year-end?
Or will the CDEC continue tightening its grip, file by file, bank by bank?
A Three-Way Clash of Institutions Emerges
The more this issue unfolds, the clearer it becomes that the tension isn’t limited to banks and the CDEC.
Cobac, the Central African Banking Commission, has stepped into the arena.
The regulator sent a pointed letter to Cameroon’s Finance Minister accusing the CDEC of going too far with threats of seizures and legal actions against banks. Cobac argued that such moves risk destabilizing public confidence and, more worryingly, bypass the regional rules adopted earlier for managing public deposits.
A single sentence for emphasis. That letter rippled through the sector.
Cobac’s intervention pulls the Finance Ministry into the triangle, creating a three-way clash that touches on issues far deeper than delayed transfers. Each institution—Cobac, Minfi, CDEC—carries its own mandate, but their roles intersect sharply around public funds.
In that sense, the tension tells us something about the shape of financial governance in Cameroon. The frictions expose how regulatory authority is shared, contested, and sometimes blurred.
One shorter sentence again. And banks feel caught in the middle.
Rising Concerns About Liquidity and Market Dynamics
The lack of transfers raises a simple but uncomfortable question: why is so much money still sitting in the banks?
Some analysts whisper about liquidity preferences.
Others talk about the operational burden of sorting which accounts fall under mandatory transfer rules.
Before jumping to conclusions, it helps to anchor one section with straightforward numbers, so here’s a clean table summarizing transfers already made by key institutions:
| Institution | Amount Transferred (CFA) |
|---|---|
| BICEC | 13 billion |
| SCB | 8 billion |
| Société Générale Cameroun | 7 billion |
| Standard Bank | 6 billion |
| Bange Bank, UBC, UNICS | 1 billion each |
This table makes the imbalance visible enough.
Here’s one small bullet point capturing the tension that many investors, lenders, and analysts now whisper about:
-
A significant share of the funds still held by banks may be tied to active client operations, meaning forced transfers could push institutions into awkward balancing acts between compliance and liquidity.
One sentence again. And that’s exactly why the issue feels so sensitive.
The race to meet the CFA400 billion target is turning into a stress test of institutional coordination in Cameroon. It also reveals how intertwined political authority, financial regulation, and public fund management truly are.
With the year-end deadline approaching, the next moves will shape not just compliance numbers but the long-term distribution of power in the country’s financial architecture.
