In banking, the future isn’t decided in press conferences. It’s decided in the core — the quiet system that posts every deposit, prices every loan, and moves every payment. By that measure, 2025 was a revealing year for UBA, and the numbers tell a blunt story.
For the full year, UBA’s gross earnings slipped to ₦2.97 trillion from ₦3.1 trillion. Profit after tax fell much harder, down 47% to ₦404 billion from ₦766 billion a year earlier. Two things drove that drop. First, the bank took a ₦331 billion hit in loan loss provisions as it cleaned up legacy credits after regulators ended forbearance. Second, it recorded a ₦140.6 billion net foreign exchange loss, a sharp reversal from the ₦181.8 billion gain it booked in 2024. At the same time, operating expenses jumped by over 70%. The market noticed. By mid-2026 UBA was trading around ₦46.00 per share with a market capitalization near ₦1.97 trillion.
That puts UBA well behind GTCO and Zenith, not because UBA is small, but because its engine runs differently. GTCO closed 2025 with profit after tax of ₦865 billion, and by July its market value had reached ₦4.75 trillion at a share price of ₦131.00. Zenith held its profit steady at ₦1.04 trillion and became the first Nigerian bank to cross ₦5 trillion in market value, with shares at ₦124.90. Access Bank even grew profit to ₦743 billion. Investors are paying GTCO and Zenith a premium, with P/E multiples around 5 to 5.5 times, because they see earnings that are stable and scalable.
The reason sits in the core banking systems. GTCO built one integrated platform that runs banking, payments and wealth together. Because everything sits on the same data, new products go live faster, reconciliations are automated, and risk is visible in real time. That is why GTCO could keep setting the pace in retail and payments even when profits dipped. It owns the rails, and the market rewards that.
Zenith took a different route but got a similar result. It invested heavily in its own core, in data centers and straight-through processing. The payoff in 2025 was reliability. While other banks struggled with provisions and cost spikes, Zenith kept earnings flat and costs under better control. A strong core also helped it manage large corporate and treasury business, where margins are stickier. That stability is exactly what pushed its valuation above ₦5 trillion.
UBA’s challenge is the opposite. Its greatest asset, a footprint in more than 20 African countries, also created complexity. The bank runs multiple core systems from different vendors, each customized for local markets. That makes it slower to roll out a new product across the group. It makes integration and maintenance expensive, which helps explain the big jump in operating costs. It also makes risk harder to see quickly, so loan problems and FX exposures surfaced later and cost more to fix. UBA was early to talk about pan-African banking and fintech partnerships, but without a unified core it could not turn that vision into standards and scale. Competitors and fintechs filled the gap.
The implication is straightforward. A core is not an IT issue. It is where strategy becomes profit. In 2025 GTCO used its core to drive speed and ecosystem growth. Zenith used its core to protect margins and earnings. UBA’s fragmented core turned into higher costs and more volatile earnings. That is why the market puts a discount on UBA’s shares even though the bank remains large and well capitalized after the recapitalization drive.
If UBA wants to close the gap, it will have to do what GTCO and Zenith already did: consolidate platforms, standardize processes across countries, and drive the cost to serve each customer down. Until then, it will keep leading the conversation about the future of African banking, while GTCO and Zenith keep capturing most of the profits being made in the present.
