By Tosin Olatokunbo
The managing Director/ chief executive officer of Guarantee Trust Bank, Segun Agbaje has disclosed that the bank will leverage on its huge customers base to become Africa’s financial behemoth in few years, by diversifying into telecoms, insurance, pension franchises.
The bank’s has strategically positioned itself as the most profitable commercial banks in the country for three decades and has passed the Central Bank of Nigeria’s capitalization threshold.
“We have never had the strategic objective of being the biggest bank in the country. The strategic objective of GTB is to be number one in profitability, ROEs and ROAs. We believe it is not the size that matter to shareholders; the bank with the biggest branches does not make enough profit,” Agbaje said.
The retail lender has grown from barely 3 million customers few years ago, to over 13 million customers, and remained the most capitalized and profitable deposit money banks, DMBs in the country, according to figures from the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN.
According to a report from the Nigerian Stock Exchange, NSE the bank has declared a third quarter 2020 pre-tax profit of over N167 billion, coming barely few days after its management hinted of plans to become a holding company.
Speaking in Lagos recently, Agbaje said GT Bank has decided to diversify income beyond banking in line with its strategic position as the leading financial service provider in the continent.
He said the bank is creating opportunities for Fintechs, Telcos, insurance under one platform which will lead to job creation and profitability for its numerous shareholders.
“The universe of banking is changing r=dramatically from what it was 10 years ago and GT Bank” cannot afford to be left behind, adding that the bank does not want to lose a large chunk of what is happening in the financial landscape because that means “you will miss what the Telcos, Fintechs and lending companies are doing.”
He said the decision not to join the bandwagon of holdco over a decade ago was purely strategy, as the bank wanted to focus on providing core banking service which helped the bank to become the most profitable bank in the country within few years.
But now “it is time to diversify earnings. And the only way to diversify your earnings in Nigeria today is to create a holding company structure. We are focused on creating our assets management system. The PFA is growing, what we want to do is to build an assets management company.
The reason why we have asset management is because it complements our business. We have grown a very big retail business today. Sometimes when some people has a high yield, we lose such opportunities” to our competitors, but creating our own assets management company will bring all services” in the banking, PFAs, Asset management into the bank’s ‘ecosystem’ the bank’s CEO said.
He, however, hinted that “We are still going to face our core banking services; and we are not going to let that drop. GTB will continue to be the mother ship for us. We will continue to deepen our retail, SMEs business.”
