Access Holdings will cut its equity stakes in overseas banking subsidiaries within 12 months after the Central Bank of Nigeria ordered a cap on overseas equity investments, the group's finance chief told investors on Tuesday.
Roosevelt Ogbonna disclosed on an investor call in Lagos that the CBN has told Nigerian banks to limit overseas equity investments to 10% of shareholders' funds, and that Access has been given a year to bring its positions into line.
The arithmetic makes the order urgent. Access Holdings reported total shareholders' equity of approximately N4.253 trillion at the end of 2025, which means a 10% cap would limit its overseas banking subsidiary exposure to roughly N425.3 billion. By contrast, the group's 2025 acquisition of a 76% stake in AfrAsia Bank in Mauritius through Access Bank UK cost N611.1 billion.
Those figures underline the scale of the task. Access has built a presence across at least 24 countries through organic growth and acquisitions, including a 74.9% purchase of Standard Chartered's Gambian subsidiary for N9.5 billion in 2025 and the closure of Standard Chartered's consumer and business banking unit in Tanzania for N14 billion the same year.
Access Bank UK and the Nigerian parent together accounted for 89.2% of the group's 2025 bottom line, a concentration that shows where most earnings currently come from and where management will likely focus in negotiations and capital planning.
The timing of the directive follows a period of tighter supervision by the CBN under Governor Olayemi Cardoso, who began tightening governance and capital rules across the banking sector after taking office in 2023. The sector completed a recapitalisation exercise in early 2026 after banks met higher minimum capital thresholds; Access itself completed a rights issue during that exercise.
The new 10% rule — and the 12-month window for compliance — makes certain recent acquisitions immediately problematic. The AfrAsia purchase alone exceeds the cap when measured against the group's reported equity. That gap forces a choice: reduce individual stakes, sell whole units, or find regulatory waivers; Ogbonna said the group has 12 months to decide and act.
Access management has signalled that shareholder distributions were adjusted to align with regulatory and prudential requirements. Management spokesman Innocent C. Ike said the board remains committed to rewarding shareholders, and that the decision to pause dividends for 2025 was not driven by earnings weakness or cash-flow problems but by regulatory alignment. He added that the group's 2025 performance shows the franchise can generate value and that distributions will resume sustainably once regulatory conditions are satisfied and approvals obtained. He also stressed that maintaining the confidence of regulators, depositors and stakeholders is central to the group's operating philosophy.
The practical work ahead is straightforward and difficult: identify which subsidiaries to trim, find buyers willing to pay for minority or majority stakes, and execute those sales without destabilising operations or earnings. Access Holdings will need buyers with both capital and appetite for operations in the countries where it now has majority positions.
There is also an unresolved question about control. One reading of the group's statements is that it will partially divest from some banking subsidiaries while retaining super-majority positions; the regulatory cap, however, would mathematically force some stakes below majority in key units unless Nigeria's parent or other parts of the group are restructured for capital relief. It is not yet clear whether Access intends to shift to minority holdings in any major market or to pursue outright divestments of smaller operations.
The mandate will redispatch management attention from growth-by-acquisition to selective pruning. That shift risks reversing the expansion that took Access into at least 24 countries, and it hands significant leverage to potential buyers and deal advisers in pricing any sales.
The central question now is procedural: which subsidiaries will be cut, and will the group accept minority positions or sell units outright? The answer will determine whether the CBN’s 10% limit results in a smaller but still tightly held multinational banking group, or in a meaningful roll‑back of Access’s international footprint.
