LAGOS, Nigeria — Access Holdings Plc Group Chairman Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede has declared that the group has concluded its aggressive expansion phase and is now focused on value creation and shareholder returns, with an ambition to become Nigeria’s equivalent of Standard Bank of South Africa.
Okay News reports that Aig-Imoukhuede made the disclosure during a media chat with financial journalists after the bank’s 4th annual general meeting in Lagos on Wednesday, June 10, 2026, pointing to the group’s N1.007 trillion profit and N51.56 trillion balance sheet as evidence of a strategy built on sustainable value creation.
“Our ambition was not for you to see our performance in the lens of Access is a great bank and compare us to GTCO or Zenith. Our ambition was for you to see us as Access is a great bank, compare us to Standard Bank of Africa,” Aig-Imoukhuede said.
He noted that Standard Bank built its pan-African footprint over 170 years, while Access Holdings executed 20 mergers between 2002 and 2025 to build comparable scale in roughly 30 years. “We’ve done the scale stage of the evolution. Now we’re doing the value part of it,” he said.
Aig-Imoukhuede acknowledged that the scale-building strategy came at a cost to shareholders, particularly on share price performance and dividend consistency, explaining that every acquisition required fresh capital raises which diluted earnings per share and suppressed returns on equity.
He cited the group’s recently announced acquisition of a Mauritius-based bank as an example of a transformational move that temporarily pressures returns but positions the group in business corridors unavailable to most sub-Saharan African banks outside South Africa.
“This is that time for us. 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. That’s what I want you to say. Then we will consider expansion of that nature,” Aig-Imoukhuede said.
He added that the group’s benchmarks going forward would be Standard Bank’s return on equity, earnings per share, and cost of risk.
Access Holdings posted gross earnings of N5.529 trillion, total assets of N5.556 trillion, and profit before tax of over N1 trillion for the 2025 financial year. The group currently carries one of the largest share counts of any Nigerian bank, a direct consequence of repeated capital raises to fund acquisitions.
Aig-Imoukhuede confirmed that share reconstruction remains a tool the group is familiar with and could deploy, but noted that timing is critical and that it would not be proper to embark on share reconstruction at a time when the lender just raised capital through equity.
Standard Bank, a member of the Standard Bank Group, is Africa’s largest bank by assets, with operations spanning more than 20 African countries and key international financial centres.
