By Aduragbemi Omiyale

Despite the challenging operating environment and tightening monetary policy stance, Zenith Bank Plc improved its gross earnings in the first quarter of 2026 by 6 per cent to N1.01 trillion from N950 billion in the corresponding period of 2025.

In the unaudited financial statements of the lender for the period ended March 31, it was revealed that the growth was driven by an increase in interest income and non-interest income.

In the results submitted to the Nigerian Exchange (NGX) Limited on Thursday, April 30, 2026, it was disclosed that the rise in interest income was primarily due to the expansion of the bank’s risk asset portfolio, supported by disciplined, risk-adjusted pricing.

It was observed that interest expense moderated by 5 per cent year-on-year in Q1 2026, underscored by a continued optimisation of the lender’s deposit mix and funding structure. This resulted in a 7 per cent growth in net interest income to N634 billion from N591 billion in Q1 2025.

Non-interest income also improved 19 per cent year on year to N106 billion from N89 billion, highlighting an improvement in fees and commissions and higher contributions from other operating income streams.

This performance reflects stronger customer activity and deeper transaction volumes across key business channels.

As a result, the profit before tax went up by 3 per cent year to N361 billion from N351 billion, and the profit after tax marginally increased by 1 per cent to N314 billion.

Profitability was further supported by a decline in cost of funds to 3.76 per cent in Q1 2026 from 3.90 per cent in Q1 2025; while cost of risk moderated to 2 per cent in Q1 2026, reflecting a prudent and proactive risk management stance in an elevated yield environment.

Gross loans increased by 9 per cent from N11.06 trillion as at full year 2025 to N12.04 trillion in Q1 2026, reflecting the continued commitment to carefully deploying credit into high-growth sectors of the economy that enhance portfolio returns.

Asset quality strengthened as the Non-Performing Loan (NPL) ratio eased to 3.79 per cent, from 3.82 per cent reported in December 2025, underpinned by disciplined credit risk management. Customer deposits rose to N24.47 trillion in Q1 2026, while total assets increased by 2 per cent to N32.01 trillion over the same period.

Return on Average Equity (ROAE) and Return on Average Assets (ROAA) stood at 24.9 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively, supported by strong top-line earnings and enhanced balance sheet efficiency.

Net interest margin (NIM) strengthened to 12.5 per cent, up from 10.3 per cent in Q1 2025, underscoring the Group’s ability to preserve its margins and deliver improved shareholder returns. Prudential ratios remained strong and comfortably above regulatory requirements.

The Group’s Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR) and Liquidity Ratio stood at 23.5 per cent and 71 per cent, respectively, while the coverage ratio remained strong at 169 per cent, reinforcing the Bank’s resilient capital and liquidity position.

Its performance underscores its continued focus on sustaining high-quality earnings growth, further strengthening asset quality, and deepening customer engagement through continued digital innovation. The Bank remains firmly committed to delivering sustainable growth anchored on sound corporate governance, prudent risk oversight, and disciplined capital allocation.

By Aduragbemi Omiyale

After 12 years on the board as a non-executive director, Mr Jim Ovia has retired as the chairman of Zenith Bank Plc, paving the way for Mr Mustafa Bello to take over.

Mr Ovia established Zenith Bank in 1990 and became its chief executive before retiring in 2010, and handing over to Mr Godwin Emefiele. He was appointed as the head of the board as a non-executive director in 2014 until his retirement.

At a board meeting held on April 27, 2026, the appointment of Mr Bello as the new chairman was approved to ensure continuity.

According to the statement, Bello, an engineer who joined the board on December 29, 2017, is currently the bank’s longest-serving director.

At the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the lender in Lagos on Tuesday, Mr Ovia announced his retirement after completing the mandatory 12 years, and in compliance with the corporate governance guidelines of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

During his tenure as chairman, Mr Ovia gave direction to the financial institution and ensured strong leadership, strategic direction, and effective board oversight.

“The board expresses its deep appreciation to Mr Jim Ovia for his outstanding service and invaluable contributions.

“His visionary leadership, unwavering commitment to good governance, and dedication to stakeholder value creation significantly strengthened the group’s strategic positioning and reputation during his tenure.

“He has extensive leadership experience at board and executive levels, a strong understanding of corporate governance principles and regulatory expectations and a proven track record in strategic oversight and organisational growth. He has also demonstrated integrity, independence, and sound judgment,” the lender said.

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.