ACCESS HOLDINGS: THE TRILLION-NAIRA PROFIT THAT LEFT SHAREHOLDERS WITH EMPTY HANDS
For shareholders of Access Holdings, the last eighteen months have been a lesson in the difference between profit on paper and cash in hand. This is a register that for over a decade was accustomed to twice-a-year income, interim and final, a stock bought by retirees and income funds precisely because it paid. That social contract has broken.
The group that built Africa’s largest bank by assets just reported another record, N667.4 billion pre-tax profit in nine months to September 2026, with third quarter earnings rebounding 78.4 percent. In full year 2025 it crossed N1 trillion pre-tax for the first time, N1.01 trillion, up 16.2 percent. Gross earnings hit N5.53 trillion, total assets N51.6 trillion, customer deposits N34.6 trillion. Yet the payout is zero. No final dividend for 2025. No interim for half year 2025, the first omission in ten years. And at the earnings call on May 5, 2026, management warned that half year 2026 interim may also not be paid. From N5.00 total dividend in 2024 to 25 kobo in 2025, a 95 percent collapse. While five other big banks paid N917.9 billion in final dividends for 2025, Access, UBA and First HoldCo paid nothing.
The travails of the ordinary shareholder are therefore immediate and painful. First is outright income drought. A share that yielded 12 to 15 percent now yields near zero, and the market has repriced it as a giant with miserable value for shareholders. Second is dilution without compensation. Shareholders were asked to fund the 2024 rights issue to meet the Central Bank of Nigeria’s N500 billion capital requirement and to finance pan-African expansion, on the promise that diversified earnings would support higher dividends. That expansion is now the reason dividend is blocked. They paid for growth they cannot eat. Third is return destruction. Return on equity fell from 21.6 percent to 18.4 percent in full year 2025 despite the trillion naira profit, because impairment charges more than doubled to N523.6 billion, eroding what should have been distributable. As the chairman himself admitted at the June 2026 annual general meeting, ensuring earnings per share consistently exceeds cost of capital is now central, an admission that the bank is currently earning less on more. Fourth is uncertainty premium. Renaissance Capital still forecasts 2028 for Access to resume dividends, which would mean three full years of zero income. First HoldCo at least offered a 60 percent payout policy, UBA says it expects to pay in 2026, Access says its constraint is resolved, but the market no longer believes management words, it waits for a Central Bank circular. For a shareholder over 60 years old who built a retirement plan around Access dividends, this delay has caused real friction at home and loss of faith.
Behind that shareholder pain are three regulatory traps that Access walked into, two of them self-inflicted by its aggressive growth strategy.
The origin of everything is the Central Bank of Nigeria’s letter to all banks dated June 13, 2025, titled Temporary Suspension of Dividend Payments, Bonuses and Investment in Foreign Subsidiaries. In that circular the CBN directed that all banks currently benefiting from credit or Single Obligor Limit forbearance shall suspend dividend to shareholders, defer bonuses to directors and senior management, and refrain from investing in foreign subsidiaries or new offshore ventures, until they fully exit forbearance and demonstrate compliance with capital adequacy and provisioning standards through independent verification. Forbearance was the pandemic-era relief that allowed banks to keep large stressed oil and gas loans as performing, without heavy provisioning. When it expired in first quarter 2026, the reckoning came. UBA, First Bank and Ecobank saw non-performing loan ratios jump above 10 percent overnight as those loans were reclassified. Access was the outlier at 2.5 percent, proof that it had provisioned more aggressively earlier, taking N331 billion in loan loss and N278 billion in derivative losses at UBA versus N523.6 billion impairment at Access. In substance, Access had exited forbearance. In law, it had not, because the CBN never sent examiners to independently verify cash provisioning and capital adequacy. As of October 2, 2026, Access told the Nigerian Exchange it was still awaiting requisite regulatory clearance to publish its audited half year accounts. No verification circular has been issued till date, and without that stamp, dividend is illegal no matter how large the profit. Analysts flagged this opacity from day one. Stanbic IBTC’s Salesman note in June 2025 pointed out that CBN never disclosed volume of forbearance per bank, never clarified the link to Single Obligor Limit, and gave no timeline for compliance. EFC London was more critical, noting that only GTCO, which had aggressively exited all forbearance in full year 2024, would be able to pay interim dividend, and calling the circular a blanket sabotage of bank capital raising after the windfall tax, questioning whether it was targeted at Access Holdings commitment to raise interim from 45 kobo to N1.
If forbearance was an industry-wide trap, the second trap is Access-specific and stems directly from its expansion model. Under BOFIA Section 19(8)(c), a Nigerian bank is not permitted to invest more than 10 percent of shareholders funds in foreign banking subsidiaries. By full year 2025, Access Holdings’ exposure stood at 19.3 percent, almost double the threshold. That is the cumulative cost of acquiring banks across Africa and beyond. Presentation materials from the May 2026 earnings call showed international operations now account for 33 percent of loans, 23 percent of shareholders funds, and 52 percent of profit before tax combined with Rest of Africa, while Nigeria’s contribution to profit declined to 48 percent. Five years ago Nigeria was over 80 percent. Foreign subsidiaries largely operate independently with local capital structures, but the capital committed outside Nigeria triggered regulatory concerns over concentration. The Central Bank gave 12 months to remediate. Management says the fix is done, that foreign subsidiaries are now already sitting at the Financial Holding Company level, not at Access Bank Plc level, and that the June 2026 draft guideline on Financial Holding Companies formalizes this by allowing holding companies to hold foreign subsidiaries directly and ring-fence the Nigerian bank. The group also says the money to pay dividend is sitting at the HoldCo from the 2024 rights issue and earnings from non-bank subsidiaries like ARM Pensions and Access Insurance. But the structure creates a catch-22 that shareholders feel. Foreign subsidiaries must retain capital for host regulators and cannot upstream cash freely to HoldCo, yet the capital already invested counts against the 10 percent limit at the bank level, preventing the bank from paying dividend to HoldCo, and HoldCo cannot pay shareholders until it receives cash from the bank. The international network that should have been a goldmine for trade finance under AfCFTA is now the reason dividend is blocked.
Just as Access thought it had solved structure and asset quality, a third hurdle emerged. The June 2026 draft adds a new condition that Financial Holding Companies must maintain a minimum 20 percent capital buffer above the Nigerian bank’s capital adequacy ratio, held at HoldCo level and cannot be lent back to the bank, designed to ensure the HoldCo can absorb shocks from foreign subsidiaries without destabilizing the domestic bank. Zenith needs minimal extra capital and will see least dilution, Access faces moderate dilution having already diluted shareholders in 2024, while First HoldCo and UBA face higher dilution and dividend risk due to larger capital gaps and non-performing loan shocks.
The implication is that Access has done the hard part better than peers. It has the cleanest book with 2.5 percent non-performing loan ratio versus peers above 10 percent, it has provisioned N523.6 billion to exit forbearance, it has moved foreign subsidiaries to HoldCo to cure the 10 percent BOFIA breach, and it maintains capital adequacy at 18.3 percent group and 21 percent bank. But none of that matters until the Central Bank independently verifies cash provisioning and accepts the structural remediation. The process must be CBN verifies, then Access Bank Nigeria is allowed to pay dividend to Access Holdings, then Access Holdings pays shareholders. The timeline is now entirely in CBN’s hands. Until a new circular lifts the suspension, the N667.4 billion nine-month pre-tax profit will remain trapped at HoldCo, distributable on paper, und distributable in law, and the shareholder who built his life around Access dividends will continue to wait with an empty hand.
