Union Bank : How Dilettantes Turned a Pioneer Into Roadkill
For 15 years Union Bank of Nigeria has been trying to win a race that was already decided. From 2009 to today, across different CEOs, board changes, capital raises, and rebranding exercises, the bank has fought almost exclusively in the last stage of competition: market share. It has ignored the first two stages where industry leadership is actually won. That is why Union Bank is not just underperforming. It is a dinosaur already on the treadmill: large in history, diminished in relevance, running hard on efficiency and still not efficient, not growing.
The failure is not about capital. It is about time. Specifically, the failure to compete for the future when the future was still being written.
The first battle for industry leadership is for imagination. It is the competition to see technological, demographic, regulatory and lifestyle discontinuities earlier than anyone else, and to commit to an opportunity arena before the market exists. It is choosing between futures, not between products. Between 2009 and 2015 Union Bank emerged from CBN intervention, AMCON bailout, and a balance sheet full of NPLs. That crisis was real and had to be managed. But crisis management became strategy. Across that period, leadership had no independent thesis on what Nigerian banking would become. There was no early conviction on agency banking as the deposit franchise of the future. No bet on data-led SME lending. No view on embedded finance, APIs, or payments infrastructure as the new rails. While GTBank was building digital retail and Access was building scale and treasury, Union Bank was in survival mode: raising capital, cleaning books, responding to CBN circulars.
When your strategy is a reaction to regulators instead of a response to the future, you surrender intellectual leadership on day one. For six years the bank waited to be told what banking would be. By the time it looked up, the headlights of competitors were already five years ahead, and that gap set up the next failure.
The second battle is the messy middle between imagination and market share. It is the race to accumulate competencies, test product concepts, build coalitions, construct delivery infrastructure, and push your technical approach toward becoming the industry standard. This is where drivers shape how the future arrives. Union Bank was absent here too. The 2016 to 2020 period should have been about building the runway. Instead it was about restructuring and reengineering. New apps were launched. Processes were redesigned. Branches were refurbished. These are organizational transformations. They make you better at yesterday’s business.
What did not happen was industry transformation. The bank did not ask what competencies it needed to own to shape agency banking, mobile money, or platform lending. It did not ask what partners it needed to bring in, or what standard it wanted the market to adopt. Competitors answered those questions. Fintechs built payments rails and distribution. Tier-1 banks built agent networks and cheap retail deposit engines. They iterated on price, features and size until they unlocked the mass market. Union Bank spent the same years cleaning up the past. By the time mobile, USSD and agency banking became obvious, the standards were set. Union Bank could only adopt. It moved from potential rule-maker to permanent rule-taker, and that shift made the final stage unwinnable.
Having lost foresight and the migration fight, leadership defaulted to the only arena left: market share. This is the familiar war of price, features, advertising, branches, and cost cutting. It is also where the rules are already written by others. This is where Union Bank has lived for the last five years. And it is losing even here. The obsession with efficiency produced the cruelest outcome: the bank is not efficient. Cost-to-income remains above peers. Revenue growth lags. Headcount was cut, assets were sold, but the numerator never grew.
This is denominator management without a numerator strategy. It is the classic error of treating strategy as a budgeting exercise instead of an imagination exercise. When you arrive late to market-share competition, you end up discounting, shrinking, and reengineering just to stay visible. You get better at compliance without getting different.
Underneath all of this is a deeper confusion that ran through every leadership team since 2009. The bank confused organizational transformation with industry transformation. Organizational transformation is what you do after leadership is lost: downsize, reskill, redesign, rebrand. Industry transformation is what leaders do before it is lost: change the rules, create new categories, pull the market toward you. Every team chose the first. The agenda was set by the past: NPLs, capital adequacy, regulatory queries. The tools were restructuring and reengineering. The questions were internal: how do we cut 10% more, how do we clean this portfolio, how do we improve this SLA.
The questions it never asked were the ones that matter for the future. What opportunity arena are we committing to for the next decade? What competencies must we build now in data science, agent economics, and platform integration? What share of future opportunities can we access given what we are building today? That is competition for opportunity share, not market share. And it is decided years before revenue appears. Union Bank managed market share while others divided up opportunity share.
This reflects an old mental model of strategy and organization that persisted across 15 years. Strategy was seen as planning and control. Organization was seen as hierarchy and process. Leadership’s job was defined as keeping today’s business stable. That model works in stable industries. It fails in industries being redrawn by technology. In the new model, strategy is architecture: a blueprint for competencies, customer interfaces, and functionalities you must build now to intercept the future. Organization is a system for learning and unlearning. Leadership’s job is to spend a large share of its time on the external and future, not the internal and urgent. Union Bank’s leaders largely kept the old model. They benchmarked others but were no longer benchmarked. They responded to the CBN instead of shaping the migration. They celebrated restructuring as progress. In doing so, they preserved an “installed base of thinking” — the conventions and assumptions that made sense in 1995 but not in 2025.
Drivers have a premeditated view of where they want to take the industry and the ability to orchestrate resources to get there first. They are rewarded. Passengers get to the future on someone else’s terms. Roadkill never arrives. From 2009 to 2025, Union Bank became a passenger and is now at risk of becoming roadkill. Not because Nigeria stopped needing banks. Not because it lacked capital or people. But because leadership failed at the two stages that determine who writes the rules.
The way out is not another reengineering program. It is accountability and a change of questions. Stop asking how to cut. Start asking what future the bank is committed to creating and what competencies it must build now to own it. Define the bank for 2035 in concrete terms. Compete for opportunity share. Be willing to unlearn the past. Until that happens, Union Bank will remain what it is today: present in the market, absent from the future. In the race to the future, that is the definition of a dinosaur.
