After 20 acquisitions, Access Holdings targets Standard Bank’s scale while rewarding investors

Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, the Chairman of Access Holdings says the company has completed the phase that transformed it into one of Africa’s largest banking groups.

• Access Holdings says its era of major acquisitions is over after completing about 20 deals between 2002 and 2025.
• Chairman Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede wants investors to compare the group with South Africa’s Standard Bank rather than Nigerian rivals.
• He acknowledged that years of expansion diluted earnings per share and weighed on returns despite rapid growth.
• The group will now focus on profitability, return on equity and shareholder value creation.

The next challenge is convincing investors that all that growth can generate the returns they have been waiting for.

Speaking after Access Holdings’ fourth annual general meeting in Lagos, Nigeria on Wednesday, the group chairman declared that the bank’s acquisition era is effectively over, signalling a strategic shift from expansion to value creation as the lender seeks to close the valuation gap with rivals and position itself alongside South Africa’s Standard Bank.

“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,” Aig-Imoukhuede told journalists.

“Our ambition was for you to see us as Access is a great bank, compare us to Standard Bank of Africa.”

The comparison is deliberate. Standard Bank is Africa’s largest bank by assets and one of the continent’s most profitable financial institutions, with operations spanning more than 20 African countries and major global financial centres.

For decades, it has been regarded as the benchmark for scale, profitability and cross-border banking on the continent.

Aig-Imoukhuede believes Access Holdings has now built enough scale to be measured by the same standard.

From scale to value

The statement marks a turning point for a group whose growth story has largely been driven by acquisitions.

Since leading the acquisition of Access Bank in 2002, Aig-Imoukhuede and later Herbert Wigwe embarked on one of the most aggressive expansion programmes in African banking.

The strategy included the acquisition of Intercontinental Bank, the merger with Diamond Bank in 2019 and a series of transactions across Africa that expanded Access’ presence into key markets including Kenya, Botswana, South Africa and several other countries.

By the group’s count, Access completed about 20 mergers and acquisitions between 2002 and 2025.

Those deals helped transform the lender from a relatively small Nigerian bank into a pan-African financial institution with operations across multiple markets. They also came at a cost.

Aig-Imoukhuede acknowledged that repeated capital raises used to fund expansion diluted earnings per share and weighed on return on equity, contributing to a valuation discount relative to some competitors.

“We’ve done the scale stage of the evolution,” he said. “Now we’re doing the value part of it.”

According to him, Access Holdings should increasingly be judged by the same metrics investors use to assess Standard Bank, including return on equity, earnings per share and cost of risk.

Why investors are watching

The shift comes despite a record financial performance in 2025.

Access Holdings reported gross earnings of $4 billion (N5.529 trillion), total assets of $39.9 billion (N51.56 trillion) and profit before tax of $779 million (N1.007 trillion), becoming the first Nigerian banking group to cross the N1 trillion pre-tax profit mark.

Yet the group’s share price performance has often failed to fully reflect its rapid growth, with investors focusing instead on the quality of earnings, returns on capital and the impact of an expanding share count.

The challenge for Access has never been scale.

The challenge has been converting scale into per-share value for shareholders.

Aig-Imoukhuede cited the group’s recently announced acquisition of a Mauritius-based bank as an example of a strategic move that may temporarily pressure returns but strengthen Access’ long-term position in cross-border banking.

However, he suggested shareholders should not expect another wave of acquisitions anytime soon.

“This is that time for us,” he said.“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.”

A new test begins

The chairman’s comments also align with management’s broader message that the group is entering an optimisation phase after more than two decades of acquisition-led growth.

While Nigeria remains Access Holdings’ largest market, the group’s African subsidiaries have become increasingly important contributors to earnings, suggesting some of the benefits of its continental expansion strategy are beginning to materialise.

For investors, the question is no longer whether Access can build scale. It already has.

The question now is whether one of Africa’s largest banking empires can deliver the profitability, earnings quality and shareholder returns associated with the continent’s most successful financial institutions.

Aig-Imoukhuede spent more than two decades helping build the platform. Now he wants investors to judge it by what it earns rather than by how much it owns.