Access Holdings, led by Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, lands $500 million IFC facility to scale local currency lending

Access Holdings, the parent company of Access Bank and one of Nigeria's largest financial conglomerates, has secured a $500 million facility from the International Finance Corporation to expand local currency financing across its pan-African banking network, in one of the largest IFC commitments to a Nigerian financial institution in recent years.

The deal, confirmed this week by multiple sources including The Citizen Tanzania, which reported on the announcement, will deploy capital through Access Bank's subsidiaries and affiliates across more than 20 countries on the continent. The facility is designed to reduce the reliance on dollar-denominated credit in markets where local currency lending is essential for sustainable economic development, particularly for small and medium enterprises that generate revenue in local currencies but have historically struggled to access affordable local currency credit.

Access Holdings chairman Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, who built Access Bank from a small Nigerian lender into a pan-African powerhouse before stepping back into a board role, has long championed the idea that African banks should be the primary financiers of African economic activity rather than channels for recycled foreign capital. The IFC facility is a structural step toward that philosophy, providing a large pool of long-tenor capital that Access can on-lend in local currency terms across multiple markets.

The IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, has been deepening its engagement with African banking systems in 2026 as the withdrawal of USAID and the broader retrenchment of American foreign development assistance has created significant gaps in the development finance ecosystem across the continent. The IFC's own board has approved a series of major African banking facility transactions in the first half of 2026, with the Access Holdings deal among the largest.

Access Bank currently operates across Botswana, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia, plus representative offices and subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, China, Lebanon and India. Its total assets exceeded $30 billion in its most recent reporting period, making it one of Africa's systemically significant financial institutions.

The local currency lending facility is expected to be deployed across the group's African subsidiaries in tranches, with priority given to markets where foreign currency credit has been most distorting. Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa are expected to be among the first deployment markets given their relative depth of credit infrastructure and the scale of Access Bank's operations in each.