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Fannie Mae appoints Ghanaian Peter Akwaboah as Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice-President

BY Nii Ntreh February 23, 2024 6:49 AM EDT
Until his appointment by Fannie Mae, Peter Akwaboah was the COO of Morgan Stanley. Photo Credit: Morgan Stanley

Mortgage market giants Fannie Mae have announced that Peter Akwaboah will take on the roles of Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Executive Vice-President (EVP) starting from May 20, 2024.

A media release by the firm on Thursday, February 2, said Akwaboah’s roles will involve leading the chief information office, enterprise operations, business resiliency as well as enterprise workplace and security functions. Some of these responsibilities resemble the work Akwaboah is leaving at Morgan Stanley where he has been the COO since 2015.

At Morgan Stanley, he drove the technology strategy toward innovation and resilience. Akwaboah is also credited with helping Morgan Stanley build a reputable technology investment portfolio that continues to show in the company’s bottom line. He is also a board member of the Morgan Stanley Foundation and a member of the United States Federal Reserve Bank’s Payments Risk Committee.

With experience spanning about three decades, Akwaboah worked at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) before joining Morgan Stanley. At RBS, he was the Asia Pacific Chief Operating Officer for Operations, Technology, and Corporate Services. Prior to that, he held leadership roles in operations and technology at Deutsche Bank, KPMG, and IBM.

The Fannie Mae statement praised Akwaboah’s wealth of experience.

“Peter’s many years of experience and unique combination of technology and operations expertise will add to our deep leadership bench, and his wealth of experience and industry knowledge will bring great value to the company, We look forward to the talent and experience he’ll bring to our technology and operations as we continue to respond to the needs of the market, carefully balancing innovation, risk management, and our commitment to our housing mission,” Fannie Mae CEO Priscilla Almodovar wrote.

Born in the UK to Ghanaian parents, Akwaboah was raised in Ghana at a young age. He reunited with his family in the UK as a teenager to pursue higher education. He went to the University of Birmingham in the UK, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a Master’s degree in Engineering.

Despite the distance, his connection with his native Ghana endures, He has been cited as an important player in Ghana being able to secure Morgan Stanley as a lead manager in the country’s issuance of a $3 billion bond in 2019. Akwaboah is also a major donor to the Foundation of Orthopedics and Complex Spine in Ghana. The specialist hospital specializes in providing complex spine and joint replacement surgeries to adult and pediatric patients age 9 to 25.

Akwaboah was honored with the 2019 Corporate Leadership Award at the FACE List Awards gala during the Pan-African Weekend.

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