Afua Kyei

Afua Serwah Kyei was born on 15 October 1982 in London to Ghanaian parents who had moved to the UK as university students, and was raised across Highgate, Wimbledon and Purley as her family progressively moved south through the city.

Kyei initially pursued a career in science, reading Chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was selected to join the research group of the eminent chemist Professor Sir Jack Baldwin, focusing her master's work on creating anti-tumorous molecules to help treat cancer, before winning a Junior Research Fellowship in Organic Chemistry at Princeton University.

Realising that the long path of a PhD researcher was not the career she wanted, Kyei pivoted into financial services, building a career over two decades that included senior finance roles at UBS and, from 2012 to 2019, as Chief Financial Officer for Mortgages at Barclays, where she managed multi-billion-pound portfolios through the uncertainty of Brexit.

In 2019, while on maternity leave, Kyei was approached to become Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director of the Bank of England, and at age 36 she took up the role, becoming the youngest member of the Bank's executive team and, remarkably, the first Black person to serve as an executive director in the Bank's 329-year history.

As CFO, Kyei oversees the Bank's finance, strategy, performance and tax directorates, managing a balance sheet that peaked at over £1 trillion during the COVID-19 pandemic, and played a pivotal role in modernising the Bank's funding model under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023; in 2025 she was named the United Kingdom's most influential Black person in the 20th edition of the Powerlist.