Régis Bamba

Régis Bamba is the co-founder and Chief Product and Technology Officer of Djamo, the Abidjan-based neobank he launched in 2020 alongside Hassan Bourgi to close the financial access gap across Francophone West Africa. Based in Côte d'Ivoire, Bamba leads the product and technical development of a platform that has grown to more than one million customers and processed over $4.5 billion in transactions — becoming the first Ivorian startup ever accepted into Y Combinator. His engineering and product decisions have shaped Djamo's Visa card offerings, savings products, peer-to-peer transfer tools, and merchant payment infrastructure across a region where banking penetration has historically been chronically low.

Bamba belongs on the Borderless 100 because building digital banking for Francophone West Africa's 300-plus million people — more than half of whom are unbanked — is a product and technical challenge at least as demanding as what his counterparts face in more developed markets. The infrastructure he has built at Djamo is what allows that challenge to be answered at scale.