By Admin
Access Bank Plc has finally owned up, after months of speculation that all is not well with the Herbert Wigwe-led bank.
Surprisingly, it is the managing director of the new generation bank that has now revealed that the bank is seriously going through a difficult time, and because of the current situation, more than 75 per cent of the staff would be sacked.
The bank, in its website said it currently employs over 28, 000 staff.
Wigwe had revealed in a video that has now gone viral that the bank is in a serious financial problem and so, could no longer accommodate the its bogus wage bill.
According to the capitalng, an online newspaper, Wigwe has warned his staff that the bank faced ‘Armageddon’ in the next few months.
According to him, the bank will no longer be able to operate many of its branches across the country any longer and this would affect thousands of employees working in those branches.
Recall that the bank, last year, acquired Defunct Diamond Bank.
The rushed ‘marriage’ is still being perfected by the merging banks, but many of “the ongoing processes between the partners will now have to stop because of the emerging situation in the lender,” an analyst said.
He said “most diamond banks branches that Access Bank Plc has already rebranded will now have to be shut if what the managing director of the bank said is anything to go by,” he said.
Wigwe had said in the video that the bank “don’t need as many security men as required, even to the fact that we are not going to have all our branches open between now and December. We certainly don’t need all the security men. We don’t need all the tea girls. We don’t all the cleaners. We don’t need all the tellers et cetera et cetera.”
Only 25 percent of the banks staff strength will be left he said.
According to him “So that number of staff which represent 75% of our staff strength, I think, is the one we basically need to speak with their employers with a view to getting them to rationalise to the level that we think will be necessary to basically sustain a mean but actually a customer service oriented institution.”
He also explained that the bank has been surviving on bogus head cost.
“The second” problem Wigwe said “has to do with our professional cost.
Now that is one is very tricky and it is tricky because I do understand and appreciate that it is going to bring its own pain to staff. We basically have to make the adjustment the same way it sounded when we spoke ten days ago with respect to basically cutting down cost.”
The bank must now face the option of adopting a structural adjustment or going down, the chief executive said.
Under consideration is the slashing of the bogus allowance he received as the managing director, as well as the board and top executives of the bank who will now be forced to received a huge pay cut.
He said “I would be the first to take the hit and I’m going to take the largest cut, which would be as much as forty per cent (40%).
The rest, we shall have to cascade right through the institution. Everybody may have to make some adjustments of some sort.”
Meanwhile, the magazine has leant from competent sources in the new generation bank that its management is not happy with the way its chief executive has mismanaged the lender’s fortunes.
