Not Just Seats. Stakes.
Earlier this year, Nigeria completed the most significant reordering of its banking system in two decades.
The Central Bank’s recapitalisation exercise, which opened in April 2024 and closed at the end of March, required commercial banks holding international authorisation to carry ₦500 billion in capital, national banks ₦200 billion and regional banks ₦50 billion. By late February the apex bank had verified more than ₦4 trillion in fresh capital, the greater part of it raised locally.
The last time this happened, in 2004 and 2005, the sector went from eighty-nine banks to twenty-five, and the shareholder registers set then are the ones much of the industry still runs on today.
Two years. Trillions of naira. New names on the register of almost every bank in Nigeria.
