Like much of the broader literature on post-conflict state building, analyses of economic reconstruction after civil war tend to presume that policy choices in such contexts are substantially shaped by external actors, notably donors and the international financial institutions. This paper demonstrates the severe limitations of this perspective, especially in cases where a cohesive elite coalition emerges from conflict in a dominant position. In such environments, it argues, the dominant driver of economic outcomes is instead the domestic political imperative of maintaining control over access to economic opportunities, with a view to consolidating the coalition’s hold on power. The financial sector, and banking specifically, plays a particularly critical role in this regard, due to its enabling function for any larger-scale entrepreneurial venture. To empirically substantiate its propositions, the paper contrasts the post-conflict trajectories of banking sector development in aid-dependent Mozambique and oil-rich Angola, with an emphasis on the questions of bank ownership, regulatory independence, and patterns of access to capital. It finds that despite very different levels of donor involvement, ruling elites in both countries maintained significant control over their countries’ banks, decisively contributing to the domination of their emerging private sectors by politically unthreatening capitalists.