Meet Aida Diarra, the New Visa Senior Vice President for Sub-Saharan Africa

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Meet Aida Diarra, the New Visa Senior Vice President for Sub-Saharan Africa

Payments company, Visa, has appointed Aida Diarra as Senior Vice President and Group Country Manager for its Sub-Saharan Africa division. Mrs Diarra will now oversee operations in the 48 markets of the area.

Prior to this new appointment, Aida Diarra was Managing Director of Western Union and its Regional Vice President for Africa. She held the positions for more than four years.

With her new role at Visa, she will join Visa’s Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) regional management team. She would therefore be reporting to Visa’s Regional President of CEMEA, Andrew Torre.

As part of the CEMEA’s regional management team, Aida will also represent Sub-Saharan Africa within the regional and global Visa network, ensuring that best practice from other markets can be offered to the regional payment ecosystem.

With over 25-years of experience and career in strategy development and implementation, business development and operational management, Aida has held quite a number of progressive leadership positions in the global money transfer business and regional leadership positions.

Speaking on her appointment, Andrew Torre, Regional President, CEMEA, for Visa said that Aida’s wealth of experience especially in this region would really help the 60 year old payments company on its Sub-Saharan mission.

“Sub-Saharan Africa is a region of incredible opportunity – there will be more than 1500 million mobile subscribers by 2020, but many countries lack payments acceptance and infrastructure. Within the next several years an additional 55 million people in this region will be new to the banking system, and so continuing to invest in partnerships that connect these new consumers and merchants to great connected-commerce experiences, is critical for sustained and inclusive economic growth. Aida’s strong record of building great teams and strategic leadership will help us in that mission.”

On her part, Aida was excited at the opportunity and promised to give her best to help Visa.

“With just six percent of consumer payments in digital forms, this region presents an enormous and exciting opportunity for us to digitize cash, drive wider digital acceptance and support financial inclusion. I look forward to increasing the role we’re playing in making a difference to the diverse markets we support and serve,” she said.


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