The Central Bank of Nigeria has warned that the March 2026 deadline for banks to meet new share capital benchmarks will not be extended. With only 15 months left, progress among Nigeria's 36 lenders varies. Access Holdings is the only bank to have completed its capital raising exercise so far, meeting the N500 billion minimum requirement well ahead of schedule. Other tier-one banks like GT Bank, UBA, First Bank, and Zenith Bank are in various stages of their capital raising processes, facing challenges ranging from boardroom crises to IT platform migrations.
With only 15 months left for banks to meet the deadline for the new share capital benchmarks, the Central Bank has warned that the March 2026 deadline will not be shifted. Speaking to this writer, a CBN director said, “the idea of extension or shift of the deadline does not arise. They were given more than two years to meet the new threshold, and by our calculations, that is enough time. We are not contemplating an extension”.
So far, of Nigeria’s 36 lenders, only Access Holdings has concluded the capital raising exercise, bringing in a little over N351 billion from its Rights Issue of 17.772 billion shares that sold for N19.75 per share. The offer closed in August. With this, Access Bank has thus become the first to meet the CBN’s N500 billion minimum capital requirements for banks with international authorisation well ahead of the March 2026 regulatory deadline. The bank’s share capital would increase to N600 billion, N100 billion above the regulatory minimum requirement. For the other 35 banks, the next year will be a crowded and busy period. A few have gone far while many others are yet to make appreciable progress. Some like the other four tier-one lenders – GT; UBA; First Bank and Zenith – have already announced their offers, but are yet to conclude the process, others, especially the small regional and some national banks are still lagging behind. There have been a host of challenges, though, even among the big ones. FBN Holdings, the parent company of First Bank, has had its programme slowed down considerably by the boardroom crisis. The long-drawn battle between Femi Otedola and Oba Otudeko for control of the company has just been settled, with Otedola emerging as chairman of the holding company. While Zenith Bank has had to juggle both capital raising with reconstituting itself into a holding company at the same time, GT Bank has just survived a major service disruption and customer backlash due to migration to a new IT platfor
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