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| Illustration: Kevin February |
“I’m always interested in how you can use the capital markets to make a difference,” Arunma Oteh says. The treasurer of the World Bank, who meets Euromoney during a recent visit to London, says this fascination with finance came to her – or rather, was forced upon her – early on.
“I spent my career in the capital markets because of what was discussed at the dinner table with my father,” she explains.
After dinner, when she was only a young girl, her father made her and her sisters read the annual reports of the companies whose stocks on the Nigerian exchange he was invested in. “I hated it. I couldn’t believe that this was what we did every night.”
But, she adds, this served as a valuable lesson and gave her work life a direction. “From when I was a child, I recognized the power of the capital markets.”
As the treasurer of the World Bank, a position she took up in September 2015, she has never been in a better position to harness that power. Oteh and her team have been thinking of new, treasury-driven ways to address the world’s most pressing issues, from pandemics to refugee crises.