Afua Kyei

Afua Serwah Kyei, born 15 October 1982 in London to Ghanaian parents, is the Chief Financial Officer of the Bank of England, a position she has held since 2019. She is responsible for assets of over £875 billion and for ensuring the financial governance and long-term strategy of the institution that sets UK monetary policy and regulates the financial system. She is the first ethnic minority woman to rise to the Bank’s executive and, on her appointment, was the youngest executive in post. Educated at Old Palace School in Croydon, Kyei read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, completed her master’s in organic chemistry, and then pursued a junior research fellowship at Princeton University. Deciding her future did not lie in the laboratory, she qualified as a chartered accountant with Ernst & Young in London, moved into investment banking at UBS and then at Barclays (where she served as Chief Financial Officer, Mortgages between 2012 and 2019 and worked on some of the most complex transactions of the 2008 global financial crisis), and then took the Bank of England CFO role. In 2023 she was elected Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and listed among the 100 most reputable Africans. In 2026 she was named number one on The Powerlist, the most influential Black person in the UK. She is co-sponsor of the Bank of England’s D&I agenda. She is married with four children. Her appearance on Off The Agenda, the Season 2.5 episode filmed at the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street with Sir Charles Bowman, is a reference moment in OTA Media’s partnership history: the episode preceded and catalysed the partnership with LSEG. Kyei is therefore Tier 1 priority in the V4 Founding Cohort Strategy for the single highest commercial payoff of any warm re-engagement on the list. This profile is an analyst-rated Leadership Index draft produced under the methodology introduced in Version 4.0 of the AI Future-Proofing Strategy. It is prepared as a draft for subject validation, not as a final assessment.