UBA targets 15% total deposit market share

Advertisements

Pan-African global bank, United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA), has set a target of a total deposit market share of over 15 percent fir its strategic growth, especially as it remains among the top three most profitable banks in Nigeria.

Consequently, the target is to make UBA a bank of choice in Northern Nigeria and to have a UBA account holder in every nuclear family in Nigeria.

Emem Usoro, UBA’s Executive Director, Nigerian North Bank, who disclosed this, explained, “That is why leveraging on digital technology to drive financial inclusion remains paramount in our hearts, given the low level of financial literacy in Northern Nigeria.”

On how the bank navigates the global economic impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on Nigerian and African economies, she said UBA, in February 2022, had put in place a robust risk management frameworks to adapt to any emerging risk in all its countries of operations, before the advent of the war.

She added that the challenges of food security, supply chain disruptions, increase in fertiliser costs, increase in the cost of diesel and aviation fuel, among others, occasioned by the Russia-Ukraine war did not come to the bank as a surprise.

According to her, the initiative provided a greater opportunity for UBA to positively impact the communities where it has business operations in northern Nigeria, rather than the focus on continued growth and profit which happened as a natural consequence of impacting business community positively.

“All we did was to review the sectors and customer segments that would be severely affected by the war and to activate the proactive measures we had in place, including but not limited to re-evaluation of the capacity of borrowing customers in affected sectors to repay as at and when due, noting the variation of repayment terms as necessary.

“There was reduction in banking costs for some affected customer segments; aggressive financial inclusion drive to increase the number of the banked population, especially in rural communities in the North; active participation in special intervention schemes of the Central Bank of Nigeria (e.g. Anchor Borrowers Scheme, Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme (CACS)) aimed at increasing local food production, boosting the nation’s self-sufficiency and decreasing hunger in the land; greater partnerships with donor and multilateral agencies for the execution of various intervention programmes like the World Food Programmes in states like Borno, Yobe, Gombe, Bauchi, Adamawa, Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina, Kano and Abuja, where cash disbursements and fund transfers were made to hundreds of beneficiaries in excess of N12 billion,” she said.

Usoro said other initiatives by the bank include the N350million UN Women programme and the $538 million Federal Ministry of Agriculture Special Agro Industrial Processing Zones Programme, just to mention a few.