Access Holdings aims for place among Africa’s top five banks by 2027

Access Holdings is aspiring for a place among the top five banks on the continent by 2027, and is anchoring that dream on building “the platform to support Africa to trade within itself.”

Nigeria’s largest lender expects that, by that time, its five-year strategy launched in 2022 will have yielded the desired fruit of becoming “Africa’s gateway to the world,” ushering the group to the consolidation phase, where its ongoing expansion and diversification efforts will deliver value at scale.

“You can see the Africa Free Trade Continental Agreement suggests that you want to move African trade from 16 per cent to 60. The beneficiaries of Africa trading among itself will be banks like us,” Roosevelt Ogbonnna, the CEO of the banking subsidiary, Access Bank told journalists in Lagos on Monday.

“We’ve stationed ourselves within the largest banking market on the continent. That’s where we are doing business today.”

The financial services group, whose balance sheet touched N36 trillion at half year, 22.2 per cent (N8 trillion) bigger than its closest rival, had been steadily on track to join the elite league of Africa’s five biggest lenders before a depreciation of more than 70 per cent of the naira between last June and this May hurt that ambition.

Two devaluations of the naira within the seven months to January caused Access Holdings’ total assets to slide in dollar terms.

That cost the lender its ninth position among Africa’s top ten banks, a group dominated by banks from South Africa, the continent’s largest and most industrialised economy.

Nevertheless, the CEO is optimistic that recovering the lost ground and even surpassing it is around the corner.

The corporation is betting that its vast investment in southern Africa, the richest banking pool of the continent’s five regions, will help it gain dominance in the region, having established presence in all the markets there except Zimbabwe and Lesotho.

In January, Access Holdings acquired Zambia’s African Banking Corporation, extending earlier footprints in the region in countries like South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique and Angola.

“We’ve built the railroad to support payments. We are working with Afri-Exim Bank to do so. We are supporting small businesses and creating a platform that allows them to do business across the continent from the comfort of their homes.

They can export, complete all their export documents, everything online, digitally,” Mr Ogbonna said.

There are also moves to diversify the group’s operations within the financial services industry and also scale its offerings.

The group secured the Central Bank of Nigeria’s permission this January to start its consumer lending division, Oxygen.

Hydrogen, its payments arm which launched only two years ago, reported a net profit of N238 million at half-year 2024.

In October, the pensions subsidiary consummated a marriage with ARM Pensions to form a new entity known as Access ARM Pensions Limited.

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Assets under management of the new company approaches N3 trillion, with about two million retirement savings accounts holders already on its clientele.

Access Holdings said it is also accomplishing the plan to be Africa’s most respected global bank as it has already established presence in three of the world’s five global financial markets (New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Paris).