When Côte d’Ivoire’s Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations (CDC-CI) turns up on a startup’s cap table, it is rarely for decoration. On December 31, 2025, the public financial institution confirmed it had acquired a stake in Abidjan-based fintech Green Pay, formalising a partnership that places the state investor alongside Orange Côte d’Ivoire Participations (OCIP), a subsidiary of the Orange Group.
The transaction, whose financial terms were not disclosed, is the latest in a growing series of CDC-CI investments into local technology companies — a strategy that positions the fund less as a passive allocator of long-term capital and more as a quietly activist architect of the country’s digital economy.
A public investor with an increasingly venture-shaped appetite
CDC-CI’s mandate is broad: mobilise and safeguard long-term resources and redirect them into projects deemed “structuring” for the Ivorian economy. Traditionally, that has meant infrastructure, real estate and public-interest finance. In recent years, however, the institution has been edging deeper into technology, particularly fintech, where policymakers see digital payments as both a growth lever and a social policy tool.
At the signing ceremony, CDC-CI CEO Lassina Fofana framed the Green Pay deal not as a portfolio trade, but as a strategic alignment.
“Beyond a simple financial investment, this is a long-term partnership, based on trust, good governance and a shared vision of innovation in service of financial inclusion,” he said, adding that the fund is itself in the process of digitising parts of its operations.
For CDC-CI, backing Green Pay fits neatly with a wider public ambition: bring more Ivorians and small businesses into formal financial channels without forcing them to navigate legacy banking infrastructure that was never designed for mass retail use.
Green Pay: from construction to contactless
Green Pay’s origin story is less institutional. The company was founded in 2020 by Anouar Traboulsi, formerly the owner of construction firm Omni Travaux, which he sold to Marylis BTP, part of the Snedai Group controlled by prominent businessman Adama Bictogo. In the middle of a pandemic, Traboulsi pivoted from concrete to code.
A key inflection point came in early 2021 when Green Pay signed a partnership with the Groupement Interbancaire Monétique de l’UEMOA (GIM-UEMOA), the regional interbank switch for the eight-country West African Economic and Monetary Union. That agreement plugged the startup into roughly 140 financial institutions across the bloc.
The business model is straightforward, if operationally heavy: Green Pay supplies electronic payment terminals (EPTs) to merchants that are clients of GIM-UEMOA partner banks. The devices accept Visa and Mastercard cards, as well as mobile money payments irrespective of operator — a technical detail that matters in a region where customers often juggle multiple wallets across competing telcos.
Traboulsi has also outlined plans to roll out digital bank cards, nudging Green Pay closer to being a full-stack payments provider rather than a hardware distributor with software ambitions.
Orange first, the state follows
Orange Côte d’Ivoire’s involvement predates the CDC-CI transaction. In late 2022, the telco acquired a non-majority stake in Green Pay, describing the move as a way to accelerate the development of electronic payments and mobile money services in the country. The group flagged the startup’s “significant growth potential”, but kept the size and valuation of the deal private.
More recent local reporting suggests Orange has since increased its exposure and now holds a majority position, though neither party has publicly confirmed the updated shareholding structure.
What is clear is that CDC-CI’s arrival alongside Orange creates a rare hybrid cap table: a global telecoms group with deep distribution muscle paired with a domestic, state-anchored financial institution with policy alignment and patient capital.
That combination is attractive on paper. It also raises predictable questions about governance and strategic latitude in a company that must balance commercial expansion with public-interest objectives.
A signal to the ecosystem
At the announcement, Traboulsi described CDC-CI’s investment as “a strong signal of credibility, maturity and trust for the Ivorian fintech ecosystem”, arguing that it would speed up the rollout of “innovative and inclusive” payment tools.
The signal cuts both ways. For local founders, the deal underscores that Côte d’Ivoire’s public capital is increasingly prepared to write equity cheques into startups — not just lend to them — provided they fit neatly into national development narratives. For private investors, it is a reminder that in this market, the state is no longer just the regulator; it is also a shareholder.
Green Pay is currently focused on Côte d’Ivoire but plans to expand across West Africa, leveraging its GIM-UEMOA connectivity. Whether it can turn that regional footprint into a defensible moat will depend less on how many terminals it deploys and more on how deeply it embeds itself into merchants’ daily workflows — a far harder task than signing memoranda in ministerial boardrooms.
For now, CDC-CI appears content to keep backing infrastructure-heavy fintech plays that promise steady, if unspectacular, transformation. In a region where venture narratives often oscillate between unicorn fantasies and shutdown obituaries, that kind of state-backed patience may be exactly what the payments layer has been missing.