Access Holdings Plc's chairman Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede said the group had concluded an aggressive expansion phase and had moved to prioritise value creation and returns to shareholders, while positioning the firm as Nigeria's equivalent of Standard Bank of South Africa.
STRATEGY SHIFT AND RATIONALE
Aig-Imoukhuede made the remarks at a media chat with financial journalists after the group's fourth annual general meeting in Lagos on 10 June, Nairametrics reported. The chairman said the era of aggressive acquisitions had ended and that the group intended to concentrate on extracting value from existing assets and improving returns for investors.
He said the group had executed 20 mergers between 2002 and 2025 to build scale, a compressed version of a pan-African journey that took Standard Bank 170 years: "We've done the scale stage of the evolution. Now we're doing the value part of it." He said the group's benchmarks going forward would be Standard Bank's return on equity, earnings per share and cost of risk. "Our ambition was for you to see us as Access is a great bank, compare us to Standard Bank of Africa," he said.
The chairman acknowledged that the scale-building strategy had come at a cost to shareholders, saying each acquisition had required fresh capital raises that diluted earnings per share and suppressed returns on equity. He cited the group's recently announced acquisition of a Mauritius-based bank as a transformational move that temporarily pressured returns, but said it marked the end of that chapter.
MARKET IMPLICATIONS AND CONTEXT
Aig-Imoukhuede was responding to questions about the group's share price gap relative to peers and its long-term strategic direction.
He said share reconstruction remained a tool the group could deploy, but that it would not be proper to do so soon after the lender had raised capital.
The chairman framed the transition as a maturation of strategy, from building scale by acquisition to consolidating and monetising that scale.
"I want you, over the next three or four years, to come back and say, Access, we are tired of this high performance, we want to start acquiring again," he said. "Then we will consider expansion of that nature."
Sources: Nairametrics Finance
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