Banking
Educating Nigeria, One Community at a Time: Inside Union Bank of Nigeria’s Approach to Corporate Responsibility
Nigeria’s economic ambitions, whether higher productivity, a more competitive private sector, or stronger household resilience, all eventually run through the same bottleneck: the quality of the country’s human capital. For a bank, that fact carries a quiet implication. The customers, entrepreneurs, and employees of the next two decades are sitting in classrooms today, and many of those classrooms are under-resourced.
It is in that context that Union Bank of Nigeria has built its corporate social responsibility agenda around one of its major pillars – education. The thinking is not that a bank can fix Nigerian education, but that a bank has both the reach and the long-term interest to contribute meaningfully to it.
The Scope of the Work
Union Bank’s education work runs through Edu360, a platform that gathers the Bank’s various school, teacher, and youth interventions under one roof. Three threads run through it.
The first is teacher development, anchored by the Bank’s partnership with the Maltina Teacher of the Year (MTOTY) programme, which recognises and rewards classroom excellence. Teachers are the highest-leverage point in any education system, and supporting the people who already do the work well tends to produce more durable gains than one-off interventions with students alone.
The second is practical, future-facing learning. School hackathons supported by the Bank give students the chance to work in teams, tackle real problems, and encounter technology as something they can build with rather than simply consume. For young people who may otherwise meet computing only as a subject on a timetable, that shift in posture matters.
The third is financial literacy, delivered through outreach tied to globally recognised events like World Savings Day and Financial Literacy Day. The premise is straightforward: habits formed early outlast lessons learned late. A student who understands saving, budgeting, and the basic mechanics of a bank account at fourteen carries that understanding into adulthood, regardless of which institution they eventually bank with.
Beyond these threads, Edu360 has anchored long-running partnerships with educational institutions outside the Bank. One of the most established was with Greensprings School in Lagos, where Union Bank sponsored eleven consecutive editions of an annual football academy that pairs sport with leadership development for children aged five to seventeen, run alongside coaches from West Bromwich Albion Football Club. Reflecting on the partnership at the close of the 2025 edition, the school’s founder and chief executive, Mrs Lai Koiki, put it plainly:
“We are being future-ready, we are preparing the youth for the future.”
It is the kind of unadorned framing that the Edu360 intervention tends to invite from the people closest to it.
The work is mapped to Sustainable Development Goals 4 and 8, which deal with quality education and decent work, but the more useful test is whether the interventions show up in the lives of the people they are meant to serve.
A Morning at Ebutte Elefun
That test is easier to apply at the level of a single school.
As part of its back-to-school programme this year, Union Bank visited Ebutte Elefun High School in the Lafiaji Ward community on Lagos Island, distributing school bags and learning materials to hundreds of students. The contribution was funded and delivered by the Bank.
Present at the school that day was the Bank’s Chief Financial Officer, Oluwagbenga Adeoye, who attended the school as a boy. His role during the visit was personal, rather than operational. He spoke to the students about his own journey from those classrooms to the office he now holds, took their questions, and stayed to meet teachers. For students who rarely encounter senior professionals in person, the conversation was as much a part of the day as the supplies.
Outreaches of this kind are modest in scale. Distributing hundreds of bags does not transform a school system, and Union Bank does not claim that they do. What they do is reduce friction at a moment – the start of a school year, when small financial pressures can quietly push children out of consistent attendance. They also send a signal, both to the students and to the teachers around them, that someone outside the school gates is paying attention.
Why a Bank, and Why Education
There is a reasonable question about why a financial institution should be in this work at all, and it deserves a direct answer rather than a sentimental one.
A bank’s long-term performance is bound up with the financial health of the households and small businesses around it. Children who stay in school longer earn more, save more, and are more likely to use formal financial services when they do. Teachers who feel supported produce students who can read a contract, manage a budget, and start a business. None of this is altruism dressed up as strategy; it is simply the recognition that a bank’s commercial future and the country’s educational present are connected.
That recognition shapes how Union Bank approaches the work. Programmes are run with partner organisations that have deeper roots in the communities than any bank can claim on its own. Interventions are chosen for whether they address a real constraint, not whether they photograph well, and inclusion is treated as a discipline rather than a slogan, with specific work supporting girls, underserved learners, and students with disabilities.
The Honest Limits
It is worth naming what corporate education work cannot do. It cannot replace public investment, fix curriculum gaps, or compensate for the structural challenges facing Nigerian schools. A back-to-school outreach addresses access at a moment; it does not address learning outcomes over a year. A hackathon introduces students to technology; it does not, on its own, build a pipeline into the digital economy. Financial literacy sessions plant seeds; whether those seeds grow depends on what happens in the years that follow.
Union Bank of Nigeria is candid about this internally, and the structure of Edu360 reflects it.
The platform is designed to keep the Bank engaged with the same schools and communities over time, rather than rotating through one-off events. Whether that consistency translates into measurable shifts in attendance, completion, and downstream economic participation is the question the Bank itself is most interested in answering, and the next phase of the work is increasingly oriented around tracking it.
A Quieter Kind of Corporate Citizenship
There is a tendency, in Nigerian corporate communications, to describe CSR interventions in language larger than the work itself. Union Bank’s education programme is not transformational in any single year. It is steady, locally grounded, and built on the recognition that education is a long game in which banks are one of many players.
Ebutte Elefun is a useful illustration of the posture.
A school on Lagos Island. Hundreds of students started the year with what they needed. A senior executive who walked back into the corridors he once knew, not to take credit but to remind a room full of teenagers that the distance between where they sit and where he sits is shorter than it looks.
That, more than any platform name or programme title, is what corporate responsibility in education looks like when it is taken seriously.
Show up. Stay. Build the systems that let the showing-up scale, and measure honestly in years, rather than headlines, whether it worked.
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
A new product known as Asset Financing Solution, tailored for those in the Nigerian transportation and logistics sector, has been introduced by a technology-enabled financial institution, FairMoney Microfinance Bank.
This initiative marks a significant expansion of FairMoney’s product ecosystem, moving beyond personal and working capital loans into commercial asset financing. By helping entrepreneurs build a verifiable credit history through vehicle repayments, the company is supporting financial inclusion and participation within the formal economy.
Asset Financing Solution forms part of the lender’s broader commitment to responsible lending and structured financing for eligible operators, as it expands access to asset financing for mobility entrepreneurs across the country through an application process subject to credit assessment and eligibility requirements.
The sector continues to record sustained market activity with reported growth rates of approximately 9.87 per cent–10.1 per cent in late 2025.
As road freight and passenger transport remain the nation’s dominant modes of transit, FairMoney’s new initiative aims to improve access to structured asset financing for thousands of transporters and delivery merchants. By providing access to business-use transport assets, the product helps address limited access to structured financing for micro-SMEs and supports activities within Nigeria’s logistics and mobility sector.
Mobility entrepreneurs seeking to acquire vehicles can now access flexible repayment plans through an application process that is subject to credit assessment and eligibility requirements.
Leveraging its technology-enabled onboarding and risk assessment capabilities, applicants can move through a structured onboarding and evaluation process.
Repayment structures are specifically tailored to the daily and weekly cash-flow realities of mobility businesses, supporting operational continuity and business growth within structured repayment arrangements.
The programme is open to eligible applicants via the FairMoney Business platform and through designated partner hubs across major cities.
“Our mission has always been to increase financial inclusion and create income opportunities by supporting individuals and small business operators in growing their businesses.
“With this solution, we are focused on supporting small business operators and mobility entrepreneurs who contribute significantly to transportation and commercial activity. The solution is designed to provide structured asset financing for eligible operators,” the Managing Director of FairMoney MFB, Mr Henry Obiekea, stated.
Speaking further, he said, “The intra-state transportation sector in Nigeria is experiencing sustained demand and market activity, offering opportunities for mobility and transport operators. The Asset Financing Solution ensures that costs are spread into manageable instalments, thereby supporting small business operations and broader economic participation.”
By Modupe Gbadeyanka
Two former employees of Access Bank Plc, identified as Mr Obadofin Daniel Bamise and Ms Hadiza Oyiza Yakubu, have been convicted and sentenced by Justice A.A. Bello of the Kaduna State High Court for theft.
The convicts were found guilty of a separate one-count charge of theft against them by the Kaduna Zonal Directorate of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
They carried out unauthorised withdrawals on the accounts of 305 customers of Access Bank, who were beneficiaries of the federal government’s Palliative Scheme, totalling N7.8 million. They posted the unauthorised withdrawals to the Palliative Scheme’s coordinators’ accounts.
After pleading “guilty” to the charges against them, Justice Bello convicted and sentenced both of them to seven years imprisonment each, with an option of a N50,000 fine each.
According to a statement from the EFCC, the charge against Mr Bamise was, “That you, Obadofin Bamise Daniel sometime between the 5th of November, 2024 and 23rd of January, 2025 in Kaduna, within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court, while being an employee of Access Bank Plc did in your capacity as an employee committed theft in the sum of N433.000 being property in possession of Access Bank Plc and you thereby committed an offence contrary to Section 274 of the Kaduna State Penal Code Law, 2017 and punishable under same Law.”
The charge against Ms Yakubu was, “That you, Hadiza Oyiza Yakubu sometimes between the 5th of November, 2024 and 23rd of January, 2025 in Kaduna, within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court, while being an employee of Access Bank Plc did in your capacity as an employee committed theft in the sum of N806,000 being property in possession of Access Bank Plc and you thereby committed an offence contrary to Section 274 of the Kaduna State Penal Code Law, 2017 and punishable under same Law.”
By Adedapo Adesanya
Leading payments technology company, Paystack, has tapped into the AI wave for businesses with the introduction of an AI-powered “Command Centre” that allows businesses to interact with their payment data using plain-language questions instead of manually navigating dashboards.
The redesigned launch marks a major evolution in how businesses interact with the company’s 10-year-old product, which has helped to monitor transactions, manage settlements, review disputes, and run day-to-day payment operations for thousands of merchants.
The revamped dashboard, built on Pax, Paystack’s internal design system, includes the AI-native Command Centre, which is embedded directly into the Dashboard, allowing businesses to ask questions in plain language and receive answers grounded in their own Paystack data, as text, tables, or charts.
The system combines GPT models, structured data retrieval, and visualisation tools to deliver responses in the most relevant format.
It also has a simpler product architecture, with navigation reorganised into two core sections: Payments and Products, making it easier for merchants to find what they need and scale as Paystack’s offerings grow.
In a statement, the company said it also has full mobile parity that makes every screen, feature, and action available on mobile as well as desktop. It also offers a dark mode feature, as well as stronger analytics and clearer navigation built into the foundation of the product
“Businesses don’t come to their dashboard because they want to click through pages. They come because they have questions,” said Ms Dara Assim-Ita, Senior Product Designer at Paystack, who led the rebuild.
“Over the last decade, we have seen firsthand how much time merchants lose navigating tools that were built to display data rather than deliver answers. With this rebuild, we have changed that. Merchants can now simply ask ‘What happened with this transaction?’ or ‘Why is revenue down this week?’ and get a direct answer. The goal is to make the Dashboard feel less like a static reporting tool and more like an intelligent command centre – one that helps merchants understand what’s happening, find what they need faster, and make better decisions.”
To support the experience, Paystack built a new service called Project Canvas API, which handles conversations, connects to model providers, and interfaces with existing Paystack systems.
As the Dashboard handles sensitive financial data, the system was built to ensure responses are grounded in real merchant data and screened against safety and compliance requirements before being returned.
The company also worked closely with its Data Protection and Privacy team, completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment, and ran extensive adversarial testing ahead of launch.
“We are at a point where artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming integral to how businesses operate, and Paystack is committed to being on that curve for our merchants. The most powerful application of AI disappears into the work people are already trying to do, and that was the design principle behind this,” Ms Assim-Ita added.
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