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 at the first two stages of the battle for the future : one ,intellectual leadership ; two , foreshorten the migration path. . 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 only avenues open to an organization , like Union bank , confronting such insurmountable barriers indicated above , is to entry are to redraw industry boundaries so that what is now attractive lies outside the former barriers. This is done by radically shifting the basis for competitive advantage in the industry or creating entirely new industry space ideally suited to one’s own strengths In either case, whether the company can prosper from its ingenuity will depend on whether it can construct unique and nonimitable competitive advantages. Unfortunately , Union Bank has not been lucky to have a leader in the past . Even Yetunde Oni , the appointed CEO , has not demonstrated it has such a pedigree
This may not be farfetched. Union Bank is running an obsolete profit engine. It still depends on volatile corporate deposits and expensive borrowing to fund long, poorly hedged assets — the $300m unhedged FX loan being the costliest proof. A profit engine is not a process chart. It is the deep-seated belief about what business you are in, what you deliver, how money is actually made, which assets and skills are critical, and who you are competing against. Engines become obsolete when companies stop testing them: when the served market is too narrow, margins can’t be sustained, or a more efficient way to deliver the same value emerges. New engines displace old ones over time, and firms that fail to notice industry trends — technological, demographic, regulatory, social — end up spending cash, people and intellectual energy too late.
Union Bank’s problem started with the very crisis that Asset and Liability Management was designed to prevent: a dangerous breakdown in maturity, interest rate, and currency mismatching that has pushed the bank to its knees. By financing long-term, illiquid assets with volatile short-term liabilities, tolerating unhedged interest and FX exposures, and deploying funds into low-quality, unremunerative assets, the bank has simultaneously eroded its liquidity, profitability, and solvency. The only thing keeping it afloat today is the backing of the Central Bank of Nigeria — regulatory forbearance, liquidity support, and implicit assurance that has acted as its saving grace. But for how long can this continue? This lifeline, while necessary, cannot substitute for sound leadership. The root of the problem traces directly to past and present management that prioritized growth over prudence, neglected dynamic balance sheet management, and failed to enforce the controls that should have flagged these mismatches early. The challenge before Union Bank’s current leadership is therefore existential: to urgently realign assets and liabilities, restore liquidity and capital buffers, and rebuild a risk culture where ALM drives every decision. Without that, CBN support will only delay — not prevent — the day of reckoning, because no central bank can indefinitely carry a bank that refuses to carry itself.
The consequences have remained very damming. For 108 years, Union Bank Plc has carried the weight of Nigeria’s oldest banking name. That history should have translated into trust, scale, and the freedom to take long bets on the future. Instead it has become an alibi for drift. More than a decade of rescues, takeovers, rebrands and regulatory interventions has not rotated the bank out of decline. From the 2009 CBN purge under Lamido Sanusi, to Union Global Partners and Atlas Mara, to Titan Trust’s majority acquisition between 2021 and 2023, and then to the January 2024 dissolution that installed Yetunde Oni as MD/CEO, the institution has cycled through owners and executives without cycling out of fragility. The March 2026 Federal High Court ruling that nullified the CBN’s dissolution and ordered the restoration of the pre-2024 board led by Farouk Gumel only deepened the uncertainty. With fresh capital still “in process” and ownership contested in court, the bank is competing less on products or technology and more on who controls the narrative. That is why the question now being asked in trading rooms, boardrooms and regulator circles is not about the next capital raise. It is about competence: Is Yetunde Oni not another dilettante behind this dinosaur?
That failure has been enabled by governance that stakeholders describe as political capture rather than fiduciary responsibility. The open secret around Union Bank is that it became a feeding trough. Appointments to board and executive positions have more often reflected access and patronage than banking competence, with influential actors treating a 108-year franchise as a reward system. Financials are kept out of public view, ownership remains in dispute, yet the perquisites continue — allowances, contracts, prestige — while shareholder value erodes. The CBN is left to provide the implicit backstop. The bank survives not because it is well managed, but because it is too connected to fail. That dynamic removes the urgency to change and allows leaders with or without expertise to preside over an institution that is slowly being hollowed out.
The CBN and the current leadership appointed to manage the bank have been trying to raise another hope of the impending recapitalization as as a cure all antidote to its miserable position for the gullible. But this is a mere dummy as the failure is not about capital. It is about time and leadership. Specifically, the failure of Union Bank to compete for the future when the future was still being written is the genesis of its current journey on the distress lane . It failed the three overallping battle in the competition for the industry leadership and since then , it has remained a dissonur on the treadmill. Sadly , there is no hope yet on the horizon for a change from that status .
A detailed analysis of its leadership actions and inactions confirm this above view. 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.
