Late Nigerian banker Herbert Wigwe's Access Holdings has lagged rivals since his death

Shares of Access Holdings have risen about 23% since Herbert Wigwe, the banker who led its rise to become Nigeria's biggest lender by assets, died in a helicopter crash in California in February 2024. Shares of Nigeria's four other largest banks have climbed between 77% and 489% over the same period.

Investors in Lagos refer to those five lenders as FUGAZ, an acronym built from their names: FBN Holdings, now called First HoldCo; United Bank for Africa; Guaranty Trust Holding Company, known as GTCO; Access; and Zenith Bank. They are the country's biggest and most actively traded banking stocks, and they are often treated as a single group when investors track the performance of Nigeria's banking sector.

That makes them the natural benchmark for Access. All five are large, listed lenders with operations across Africa, and all five have faced the same conditions since February 2024: a sharp fall in the naira, the central bank's demand that banks raise fresh capital, and new restrictions on lenders still carrying loans under regulatory forbearance. Comparing Access with the other four separates the effect of those shared conditions from what has happened inside Access itself.

Access closed at ₦24.75 on Feb. 9, 2024, the day of the crash, according to the Nigerian Exchange's official daily list. It closed at ₦30.45 on Monday and was trading at ₦30.30 on Tuesday.

The other four have pulled far ahead. First HoldCo, the parent of First Bank, rose from ₦25.50 to ₦150.15, a gain of 488.8%. Zenith Bank rose 267.4%, from ₦36.85 to ₦135.40. GTCO gained 230.5%, from ₦40.00 to ₦132.20. United Bank for Africa, the weakest of the four, still rose 76.8%, from ₦25.45 to ₦45.00, more than three times Access's gain.

The gains are larger in dollar terms, because the naira has strengthened to ₦1,331.69 per dollar from ₦1,469.97 on the day Wigwe died. Measured in dollars, Access shares are up about 36%, UBA about 95%, GTCO about 265%, Zenith about 306% and First HoldCo about 550%, according to Billionaires.Africa calculations.

Those figures measure share prices alone. Zenith and GTCO have also paid dividends over the period, while Access has not declared a dividend for 2025, so the gap in total returns to shareholders is wider than the price figures show.

From fourth to last

The shift shows most clearly in market value. On the day Wigwe died, Access was worth ₦879.7 billion, or about $598 million. That put it close behind First HoldCo at ₦915.3 billion ($623 million) and just ahead of UBA at ₦870.4 billion ($592 million). GTCO was worth ₦1.18 trillion ($801 million) and Zenith ₦1.16 trillion ($787 million).

Access is now the smallest of the five. Its market value of ₦1.66 trillion, about $1.24 billion, compares with ₦6.83 trillion ($5.13 billion) for First HoldCo, ₦5.56 trillion ($4.18 billion) for Zenith, ₦4.83 trillion ($3.63 billion) for GTCO and ₦1.99 trillion ($1.49 billion) for UBA. First HoldCo, which was worth only slightly more than Access in February 2024, is now worth about four times as much.

Why Access fell behind

Four forces have held the stock back.

The first is dilution. Every major Nigerian bank had to raise capital to meet the Central Bank of Nigeria's new minimum of ₦500 billion for lenders with international licences, but Access did so on a larger scale than its peers. In June 2024, it announced plans to raise ₦351 billion by issuing 17.77 billion new shares, and it later sold more shares in a private placement. Its share count has risen 53% since Wigwe's death, from 35.5 billion to 54.4 billion. The other four banks increased theirs by between 24% and 31%. More shares mean each one carries a smaller claim on the group's profit.

The second is profitability. Access earned a record ₦1.007 trillion before tax in 2025, about $697 million, up 16.2%, and ₦743 billion after tax, about $514 million, up 15.7%. But its return on average equity fell to 18.4% from 21.6%, and its net interest margin dropped to 4.2% from 5.8%. The group said it had accelerated provisions on legacy loans and on loans covered by regulatory forbearance, pushing up its impairment charges. First HoldCo, by comparison, now earns a return on equity of about 30%.

The third is dividends. In June 2025, the central bank ordered lenders still benefiting from regulatory forbearance to suspend dividends, defer bonuses for senior executives and stop investing in foreign subsidiaries until they had fully provided for those loans. Analysts at Renaissance Capital named Access, Zenith and First Bank as the most exposed. Zenith said it would exit forbearance by the end of that month and keep paying dividends. At its annual meeting in June, Access's board said it remained committed to resuming dividends once the relevant regulatory conditions had been met.

The fourth is leadership. Bolaji Agbede, an executive director, ran the group as acting chief executive for 18 months before Innocent Ike, a former managing director of Polaris Bank, became group managing director on Aug. 29, 2025. In the same week, Roosevelt Ogbonna, chief executive of the main banking subsidiary, Access Bank, stepped down from the holding company's board to comply with central bank rules that cap holding company boards at nine members. He still runs the bank.

First HoldCo's rally reflects a very different story. Billionaire Femi Otedola won a long contest for influence over the group, became its chairman and kept buying shares, raising his stake to 25.87% in July. The bank's profits have jumped, and foreign investors have poured money into the stock.

Wigwe's pan-African bet

Wigwe built Access through acquisitions. He arrived in 2002 as deputy to Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede, when the two took over what was then a small bank, and succeeded him as chief executive in 2014. In 2019, he merged Access with Diamond Bank, making it Nigeria's largest bank by number of customers, and then set out to build the world's most respected African bank.

The expansion gathered pace in his final years. Access entered Kenya in 2020 by buying Transnational Bank, agreed in 2021 to buy a stake in South Africa's Grobank, and in 2023 agreed to buy Standard Chartered's subsidiaries in Angola, Cameroon, The Gambia and Sierra Leone, as well as its consumer business in Tanzania. In January 2024, weeks before he died, it agreed to buy 80% of Bank of Africa Uganda.

Most of that pipeline was completed after his death, along with deals signed later. Access signed the agreement for National Bank of Kenya in March 2024 and completed the purchase from KCB Group in May 2025, for about $109.6 million. It closed the Standard Chartered deals in Angola and Sierra Leone in late 2024. In June 2025, it bought 74.85% of Standard Chartered Gambia for ₦9.5 billion, about $6.5 million, and the Tanzanian consumer business for ₦14 billion, about $9.6 million. It also agreed to buy a 76% stake in AfrAsia Bank in Mauritius and South Africa's Bidvest Bank, for $159 million.

Integrating those banks has taken time. Kenya's central bank only recently approved the transfer of all of Access Bank Kenya's assets and liabilities to National Bank of Kenya, folding the two businesses into one. Access now operates in more than a dozen African countries as well as in Europe and Asia, and its total assets reached ₦51.56 trillion, about $35.7 billion, at the end of 2025.

The Standard Bank test

The current leadership is not chasing growth the way Wigwe did, and it has said so. Aig-Imoukhuede, who returned as chairman in March 2024, told shareholders in June that the group had completed 20 acquisitions in 20 years and that the buying phase was over. "The acquisition era is over. Now comes the returns," he said.

The new strategy, called "From Scale to Value," measures Access against South Africa's Standard Bank, the continent's largest lender, rather than against GTCO or Zenith. Aig-Imoukhuede wants Access to match Standard Bank's return on equity, earnings per share and cost of risk within three to four years.

The chairman has a large personal stake in the outcome. He and Wigwe co-founded the Tengen Family Office and owned it in equal parts. Access's 2025 annual report attributes 4.82 billion shares to Aig-Imoukhuede indirectly, through four companies tied to that partnership: Coronation Trustees (Tengen Mauritius), with 1.97 billion shares; Trust and Capital, with 1.15 billion; United Alliance Company of Nigeria, with 1.06 billion; and Tengen Holdings, with 641 million. The same holdings were attributed to Wigwe before his death. Aig-Imoukhuede also owns 178.8 million shares directly. Combined, the roughly 5 billion shares amount to 9.2% of Access and were worth about ₦152 billion, or $114 million, at Monday's close, according to Billionaires.Africa calculations.

The report separately lists the estate of Herbert Wigwe as holding 3.05 billion shares, or 5.71%, a stake worth about ₦92.7 billion, or $69.6 million, at Monday's price. The filings do not explain how that stake relates to the jointly held companies. The estate has been the subject of a legal dispute involving his family.

The founders' vehicles have not been buying lately. Their holdings were unchanged between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025, and the last disclosed purchases came in May 2024, when Tengen Holdings (Mauritius) bought about 59.4 million shares for roughly ₦1.01 billion. Before that, the Coronation Trustees block took up its rights in the 2024 capital raise and more, lifting its stake from 7.11% to 7.41%. Since then, the private placement has trimmed the founders' combined stake from about 9.4% to 9.2%.

On paper, the gap with Standard Bank looks narrow. Standard Bank earned a return on equity of 19.3% in 2025 and 19.8% in the first half of 2026, and it is targeting 18% to 22% through 2028. Access's 18.4% is close.

The quality of those returns is very different, though. Access earns its returns in naira, in an economy where government bond yields were above 19% as recently as late 2024, so an 18.4% return on equity barely matches what investors could earn by lending to the government. Standard Bank says its returns exceed its cost of equity, and it pays out 45% to 60% of its earnings as dividends. It raised its dividend 12% for 2025, while Access is waiting for regulatory clearance to pay one at all.

Scale is the bigger gap. Standard Bank ended 2025 with total assets of R3.6 trillion, about $218 billion, roughly six times Access's $35.7 billion balance sheet. Its market value of about $29 billion at the end of 2025 was about 23 times Access's $1.24 billion today. Its businesses outside South Africa produce 40% of its earnings, a level of diversification that Access's acquisitions were meant to build but that is still being integrated. Standard Bank also has a strategic shareholder in China's ICBC, which owns about a fifth of the group.

Matching Standard Bank's headline ratios within three to four years is achievable if Access exits forbearance, keeps impairments down and gets the acquired banks earning. Matching its size, its dividend record and the stability that comes with earning in a steadier currency is a much longer project, and one that depends heavily on the naira and on Nigeria's interest rates.

Until that happens, the bank Wigwe led for a decade remains the smallest of Nigeria's five biggest lenders by market value.