Fidelity Bank cruising steadily to joining league of Tier 1 banks—CEO
The Managing Director/CEO, Fidelity Bank Plc, Nnamdi Okonkwo has averred that the financial institution is comfortably on its way to joining the Nigerian Tier I banking group considering the steady progress it is making in driving a five-year strategic plan.
Speaking during an interactive session ahead of last Friday’s AGM with select editors and publishers in Lagos recently, he revealed that “Two years ago, we set out at Fidelity Bank, to drive a five-year strategic plan, beginning from last year that would see us migrating to a Tier 1 bank in the country by 2022. We want to break into the league of Tier 1 banks and grow organically, keeping in mind that the other banks are also growing”.
Recall that Fidelity Bank held its 2019 AGM Friday last week Lagos where shareholders endorsed all management activities.
According to him, “This is my sixth year as Chief Executive of the bank, and by God’s grace; we are driving the plan, and the numbers show that we are making steady progress, year-on-year, in terms of balance sheet size, deposit and profitability.”
Okonkwo explained that “As we are doing this, we are keeping our eyes on the safety of the bank. We have thus kept our eyes on the bank’s capital adequacy, liquidity ratios, risk management framework, governance and compliance practices e.t.c. For instance, as a result of our prudence in building up capital, we were able to cushion the impact of the implementation of IFRS 9 so we took the charge out rightly
“On deposits, we grew by 26 per cent last year. In fact, in one year, we grew deposits by about N200 billion, which means that our market share is increasing.
While disclosing that “Two years ago, our desire was to make sure that low-cost deposit constitutes a larger percentage of the total deposit,” elated Fidelity Bank boss noted that “Today, we have largely achieved that as low-cost deposits now constitute about 82 per cent of total deposits.”
“On governance, you would have noticed how our Board has been strengthened. We brought on board some seasoned professionals. For instance, the Chairman of the Board is a former Chief Executive of a bank and a former Deputy Governor of the CBN for 10 years.
“We also have with us a former Managing Director of Guinness Nigeria, and another former MD of a bank. As a deliberate strategy, each time a director retires, we replace with yet another very experienced one. We also ensure diversity.
Continuing, Okonkwo added that “We are also very serious about succession; therefore, we plan ahead. As you may be aware, we recently appointed three executive directors at a go, subject to CBN’s approval. That is an outcome of planned succession.
“We are driving our retail banking with digitisation; about 81.5 per cent of our transactions are now done through digital channels. That is why you will see us building just one or two new branches in a year. In the past, we used to do like 15 to 20 branches. I can’t remember the last time I went to commission a new branch or even wrote a cheque. Digitisation has made things more efficient.
As a way of deepening financial technology (FinTech) adoption, Okonkwo revealed that “Fidelity has also taken into cognizance, customers who may not have data to do their transactions, so we introduced our USSD *770#, which does not require you to have smartphone or data to carry out some banking transactions.”
“This category of customers does not need android phones to operate their accounts, just basic phones. This has made our cost-to-income ratio to improve significantly,” Fidelity Bank boss averred.
