A conversation with OLEA Group’s, Ayouba SEYDOU, Director, of Placement and Reinsurance

In every insurance value chain, there are people who carry risk, people who price it, and people who distribute it.

But there’s another role that becomes critical when markets are changing fast and capital is moving across borders: the leader who sits in the middle. The broker-leader who translates between global investors and local realities, between regulators and risk-takers, between what is intended and what will actually work.

That is where Ayouba Seydou operates - I spoke to Ayouba as part of our leadership series to reflect on what shaped the African insurance industry in 2025 and what it signals for 2026. His vantage point is distinctly broker-centric and distinctly pan-African. He describes 2025 as “a very, very busy year” for the brokerage sector, and the reasons he lists paint a picture of a continent in motion: foreign direct investment, rapidly evolving reinsurance regulation, and election cycles that carry real perceptions of instability even when outcomes are smooth.

Capital, regulation, and a continent that keeps moving - Ayouba’s first headline is the continued flow of foreign investment into Africa. From Asia, Europe, and the Americas, projects are being financed, built, and scaled. For brokers, these investments are not abstract statistics. They arrive as real deals that need to be structured, insured, and supported across multiple jurisdictions.

He reads the ongoing investment flow as a sign of “resilience and opportunity”, especially post-COVID, when many expected capital to retreat. Instead, the opposite happened: investment multiplied, and the insurance conversation followed. The second headline is regulatory change, particularly in reinsurance. Across the continent, Ayouba says, regulators have been imposing local retentions, tightening rules around cessions going out of Africa, and introducing local content requirements.

It’s easy to treat that as obstruction. Ayouba frames it as a predictable response: regulators see capital arriving, and they want more of the value to stay in local economies and local balance sheets. It has not been a quiet year politically either. Election cycles across the continent always raise the temperature for risk discussions, even when transitions are orderly. The real issue, he notes, is not just political outcomes, but perception, the way investors and boards interpret uncertainty.

The advice opportunity: Educate, translate, and influence - When I asked what these shifts mean for the advice segment, brokers, advisers, intermediaries, Ayouba’s answer was direct: this is a golden opportunity for advisers who understand how to operate “on the ground”. His point is that a surge in investment combined with new regulation creates complexity. Complexity creates confusion. Confusion creates pushback. And pushback, if unmanaged, becomes delay, mistrust, and failed execution.

The adviser’s value is to stand in the middle and reduce that friction. Ayouba describes his role as two-sided education. On one side, international producing brokers and investors, whether in China, Europe, or the Americas, need local interpretation and a sense of why regulations exist. On the other, regulators need feedback on how proposed rules will land in real markets.

The earlier you see legislation coming, he argues, the more power you have to respond constructively: adapt, steer, influence, or at least prepare. And because pan-African brokers have proximity, to regulators, to market actors, to ground truth, they can explain what will work, what will not, and why. That, in Ayouba’s language, is the bridge between the local and the international.

Why reinsurance becomes the real enabler - If foreign investment is the fuel, reinsurance is often the mechanism that makes projects bankable. Ayouba explains that many African projects are financed by lenders or multinational corporates who require rated security. Here Africa faces a structural challenge: local insurers’ ratings are often constrained by sovereign ratings, regardless of operational capability. That means the reinsurance structure is not just a technical detail, it is central to whether investment conditions are met.

He points to the limited pool of A-rated capacity that lenders accept and highlights the importance of rated African reinsurance options that can support regional placements. He also notes that capacity at primary insurer level remains variable, especially in sectors where investment is concentrated: construction, mining, and renewable energy.

From a broker perspective, reinsurance is not simply “placed”. It must be balanced and matched to the investment itself, the right security, the right balance sheet, the right claims-paying ability. Ultimately, he says, the broker’s job is to ensure claims are paid. Everything else is secondary.

He also mentions fragmentation in reinsurance regulation across Africa, more rules, more local requirements, more moving parts. Again, the leadership task is to advise through complexity and “mobilize and neutralise” capacities across jurisdictions.