ACCESS HOLDINGS: A GIANT WITH MISERABLE VALUE FOR THE SHAREHOLDERS
For a bank that just made history, Access Holdings has very little to show shareholders. On paper, the group crossed the N1 trillion profit-before-tax mark for the first time in 2025, its assets swelled to a continent-straddling N51.56 trillion, and its cost-to-income ratio improved. Yet return on equity fell from 21.6% to 18.4%, impairment charges more than doubled to N523.55 billion, and for the first time in many years, no dividend was paid. That contradiction is the story of Access: a group that has mastered the art of getting big, but is yet to master the art of creating value.
The first weakness is the most telling: the group is earning less on more. The N1.01 trillion profit, up 16.2%, looks impressive until you ask what it cost to make it. The answer is N523.55 billion in impairments, driven by what management calls a full exit from CBN forbearance exposures. In other words, the profits of previous years were flattered by loans that should have been provisioned for. The clean-up is commendable, but it exposes a deeper underwriting weakness from its acquisition spree – you cannot buy banks across Africa and not buy their bad loans.
The second weakness is structural. Consolidated profit is not cash. Access discovered this painfully in May 2026 when it had to issue a clarification that its zero dividend was due to Section 19(8)(c) of BOFIA, which limits investments in foreign subsidiaries. Both Access and UBA had their dividends held pending CBN clearance. This means after spending two decades and billions of naira building a footprint from Congo to London, the group built a structure that regulatory rules now punish. Subsidiaries must retain capital for local regulators, so they cannot upstream cash to the HoldCo, and the HoldCo therefore cannot pay shareholders. The group is asset-rich but distribution-poor.
These weaknesses are amplified by clear threats. The first is regulatory risk. The more countries Access enters, the more it breaches the BOFIA threshold. The second is currency risk. The 2025 accounts showed that profits earned in Ghana, Congo and other markets shrank when translated to naira. The third is the threat of capital misallocation. Management itself admits that some subsidiaries add reach and reputation while earning modest profits. Without a clear timetable, reach becomes vanity.
And this is where its much-touted strengths have failed to neutralize its weaknesses. Its greatest strength is scale – N51.56 trillion in assets, presence in multiple markets, a diversified earnings base where almost 50% of pre-tax profit now comes from outside Nigeria, with DR Congo doubling profit. But scale was supposed to spread technology and compliance costs and attract bigger clients. Instead, it spread risk and management attention. Its second strength, improving efficiency to 51.7% cost-to-income, should have lifted ROAE, but the gain was wiped out by the impairment spike. Its third strength, the non-bank ecosystem of Access ARM Pensions, Insurance Brokers, Hydrogen Payments and Oxygen X, should have boosted fee income and de-risked earnings, yet the group still relies heavily on interest income that is vulnerable to margin pressure, as seen in the mere 8% growth in Nigeria.
Similarly, it has failed to effectively exploit the opportunities right in front of it. The opportunity to deepen, not widen, in Nigeria remains untapped. The Proshare report notes correctly that growth should come from handling a customer’s entire financial life – salary, savings, cards, collections, payroll, trade finance. But Access is still growing breadth, not depth. Its international network should be a goldmine for trade finance and payments under AfCFTA, but that network is now the reason its dividend is blocked. The opportunity to show returns by subsidiary and region, to prove that every naira has a commercial reason to be where it is, has been ignored in opaque consolidated reporting.
Access Holdings has built scale. No one disputes that. What Chairman Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede said at the June 2026 AGM – that ensuring EPS consistently exceeds cost of capital is central – is the right diagnosis. But two years after announcing a move from scale to value, the scorecard Proshare proposes – ROAE above cost of equity, normalized loan losses, rising fee income, clear disclosure, and restored dividend capacity – is still largely in the red.
A trillion naira profit that cannot pay dividend is not value. It is vanity. Until Access can show that its N51.56 trillion empire can consistently earn more than it costs, investors will continue to price it as a big bank, not a valuable one.
