On staff count, UBA seems to be using many more workers in its business. First Bank Holdings includes both the bank and other subsidiaries. And yet, even with that, UBA has more staff than First Bank Holdings. Though not included in the table, GTBank employs about 3,500 people with a revenue number that tracks Zenith Banks and profit of N142 billion within the 9 month under examination. Indeed, UBA has to improve its productivity as the numbers seem extremely out of phase with peers.
GTBank remains the most capitalized bank in Nigeria at N965 billion, followed by Zenith Bank at N769 billion.
Meanwhile, the fintech startups are coming after these profits. OPay plans to hit a transaction volume of $2 billion by the end of 2021. That would make it one of the most important financial institutions in Africa. OPay, according to the company, currently processes about 80% of transfers among mobile money operators in Nigeria and 20% of non-merchant point of sales transactions. If that trajectory continues, OPay could be at the center of Nigeria’s consumer sector.
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OPay, a Nigerian fintech startup founded by Opera, plans to expand its payments service operations to North Africa early next year after Covid-19 restrictions led to a spike in transactions on its platform.
The volume of monthly settlements on the OPay platform grew almost fourfold to $1.4 billion in November from $363 million in January, as people sought alternative payments services during coronavirus-induced lockdowns, the company’s managing director, Iniabasi Akpan, said in an interview from Lagos.
[…]
We plan to reach transactions value of about $2 billion by the end of this year. The company will leverage its network of 300,000 offline agents to deepen the adoption of its payments service. The company is now planning an entry into the north African market after its success in Africa’s most populous country. The process has begun and we will see how the first quarter turns out.”
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Maybe we start by defining who’s a bank employee? Things become easier and understandable once defined.
Most of the folks you see at the banking halls, are they also bank employees? This is an industry that has perfected the art of slavery, so it’s confusing discussing staff strength within each entity, it has different meanings.
There are lots of hungry and malnourished people in the banking space, so until they can account for all of them, it makes no sense discussing who has high or low headcount; not good enough.
That industry and integrity are mutually exclusive, anything can be manipulated, even the financial statements they dish out.