Nigerian banking tycoon Atedo Peterside’s Stanbic IBTC stake is worth $17.8 million

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Nigerian banking tycoon Atedo Peterside, who founded the investment bank that grew into Stanbic IBTC Holdings Plc, owns a stake in the Lagos-listed financial group worth ₦24 billion ($17.8 million), after its shares rose 60% this year.

Peterside owns 150,000,000 shares in Stanbic IBTC, equal to 0.94% of the 15.9 billion shares in issue. At Friday's closing price of ₦160 on the Nigerian Exchange, the stake is worth ₦24 billion, or $17.83 million at an exchange rate of ₦1,346 to the dollar.

Stanbic IBTC ended 2025 at ₦100 a share. At that price the same 150 million shares were worth ₦15 billion, or $10.5 million at the year-end official rate of ₦1,429 to the dollar. The rise since then has added ₦9 billion to the value of the holding, and the stronger naira has lifted its dollar value further. The group's market value now stands at about ₦2.54 trillion ($1.89 billion).

He has held a large block of shares for years. In late 2021 his holding was registered to SITL The First ANAP Domestic Trust, a vehicle that carries the name he gave his foundation and his aviation business. The trust bought 6.17 million shares at ₦39 each that November, lifting its holding to 131.2 million shares. By mid-2023 Peterside held 133.6 million shares, when the stake was worth ₦9.02 billion, as Billionaires.Africa reported at the time.

Control of the group sits in Johannesburg. Stanbic Africa Holdings Ltd., the vehicle through which South Africa's Standard Bank Group owns the business, held 10.89 billion shares, or 68.46%, at the end of 2025. That stake is worth about ₦1.74 trillion ($1.29 billion) at Friday's price. No other shareholder owns as much as 5%, and the group had 107,305 shareholders on its register at the end of last year.

Stanbic IBTC raised fresh capital in early 2025 to meet the Central Bank of Nigeria's new minimum capital rules for banks. It offered 2.94 billion new shares at ₦50.50 each, five for every 22 held, and raised ₦148.7 billion ($110.5 million). The offer was 21.9% oversubscribed. The group said the money took it past the ₦200 billion threshold set for banks with a national licence, and it injected ₦140 billion into its banking subsidiary. The central bank's higher threshold of ₦500 billion applies only to banks with an international licence.

From London to IBTC

Peterside was born in July 1955 and attended King's College, Lagos, one of Nigeria's best-known government secondary schools. He studied economics at The City University in London from 1973 to 1976 and earned a master's degree in economics from the London School of Economics in 1977. He later completed the Owner/President Management Program at Harvard Business School between 1991 and 1993.

In February 1989, at the age of 33, he founded the Investment Banking & Trust Company Ltd., known as IBTC, in Lagos. He ran it as chief executive for the next 18 years. Olawale Edun, who later became Nigeria's minister of finance, was one of its first executive directors. The firm started out as an investment bank, and IBTC Asset Management followed in 1992.

Building IBTC into Stanbic IBTC

The biggest change came in 2005, when the central bank ordered every commercial bank to hold at least ₦25 billion in capital. Dozens of lenders merged or disappeared. IBTC combined with Chartered Bank and Regent Bank on Dec. 19, 2005, to form IBTC Chartered Bank, with about ₦125 billion in assets, and the enlarged bank listed on what was then the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

Standard Bank, Africa's largest lender by assets, already owned a smaller Nigerian business, Stanbic Bank Nigeria, which it had set up in 1991 after buying ANZ Grindlays Bank's African operations. On Sept. 24, 2007, the two banks merged to form Stanbic IBTC Bank. Through a share offer, Stanbic Africa Holdings raised its holding in the combined bank to 50.75% from 33.33%. Peterside stepped down as chief executive and was elected chairman in October 2007.

The group adopted a holding-company structure in 2012 after central bank rules required banks either to sell non-banking businesses or to separate them under a parent company. Peterside became chairman of Stanbic IBTC Holdings in November 2012. In August 2014 he also joined the boards of Standard Bank Group and The Standard Bank of South Africa, and he left the chair of the banking subsidiary that September.

He had planned to leave Stanbic IBTC in 2015, but a long dispute between the group and Nigeria's Financial Reporting Council over its accounts held him back. When the 2015 and 2016 accounts were approved, he resigned as chairman with effect from March 31, 2017, after 28 years with the business. "Thankfully, the FRC matter is now behind us," he said at the time. "I would like to be able to concentrate largely on ANAP Business Jets Limited." He stayed on the Standard Bank boards until he retired on June 10, 2024.

Stanbic IBTC today

The group Peterside founded is now one of Nigeria's most profitable financial companies. Its subsidiaries include Stanbic IBTC Bank, Stanbic IBTC Pension Managers, an asset manager, a stockbroker, a trustee business, a life insurer and Zest Payment, a payments company. Chukwuma Nwokocha, a chartered accountant who previously ran Standard Bank's business in Mozambique, was named group chief executive in October 2025. Sola David-Borha is chairman.

Profit before tax rose 81.6% to ₦551.7 billion ($409.9 million) in 2025, and profit after tax rose 69% to ₦380.7 billion ($282.8 million), the highest in the group's history. Total assets reached ₦8.6 trillion and customer deposits ₦4.3 trillion. The board paid a final dividend of ₦4 a share, or ₦63.6 billion ($47.3 million), on top of an interim dividend of ₦2.50, bringing the total for the year to ₦6.50 a share, up from ₦5 for 2024.

Earnings kept climbing this year. In the six months to June 30, gross earnings rose 27.2% to ₦650.3 billion ($483.1 million), and profit before tax rose 40.1% to ₦341.6 billion ($253.8 million). Profit after tax increased 38.2% to ₦239.7 billion ($178.1 million), even as the income tax charge climbed to ₦101.9 billion.

The growth came from trading and fees. Interest income fell 5.4% to ₦359.1 billion, but non-interest revenue more than doubled to ₦278 billion ($206.6 million), helped by trading revenue of ₦126.4 billion, compared with a small loss a year earlier. Total assets rose 26.6% from December to ₦10.91 trillion ($8.1 billion). Customer deposits grew 5.9% to ₦4.63 trillion, and loans to customers rose 8.8% to ₦2.59 trillion.

The board declared an interim dividend of ₦4.50 a share, up 80% from ₦2.50 a year earlier, a total payout of about ₦71.6 billion ($53.2 million). On a holding of 150 million shares, the interim dividend comes to ₦675 million ($501,500).

Anap Jets, his foundation and politics

Peterside now spends most of his time on Anap Jets Ltd., a business aviation company he founded and chairs, which began operating on Jan. 1, 2015. He also sits on the board of ART X Collective, the Lagos company behind the ART X Lagos art fair, and was the first chairman of Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneurship, the Nigerian arm of the global group that mentors fast-growing companies, from 2017 to 2023. He sits on the African advisory board of the Prince's Trust International.

He has held several other boardroom roles. He was non-executive chairman of Cadbury Nigeria Plc from April 2010 to June 30, 2020, and served on the boards of Flour Mills of Nigeria Plc, Nigerian Breweries Plc and Unilever Nigeria Plc until 2020. He chaired the committee that produced Nigeria's first code of corporate governance for public companies in October 2003. Between 2011 and 2015 he was a member of the National Council on Privatisation and chaired its technical committee, which oversaw the sale of the state-owned power companies. He was made a Commander of the Order of the Niger, one of Nigeria's national honours, in 2010.

In 2003 he set up the Atedo N.A. Peterside Foundation, known as Anap Foundation, which promotes good governance. He has led it since it was founded. The foundation set up a COVID-19 think tank in March 2020 and started GoNigeria, a campaign to get young Nigerians to register and vote, in December 2021.

Ahead of the 2023 general election, the foundation commissioned NOI Polls to run a series of presidential opinion polls. A December 2022 poll put Labour Party candidate Peter Obi at 23%, ahead of Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress at 13% and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party at 10%. Festus Keyamo, then the chief spokesman of Tinubu's campaign, called the poll "deliberately skewed." Tinubu went on to win the election.

Peterside joined the Social Democratic Party in May 2022. "It is difficult to improve a club or party that you do not belong to," he said at the time. He remains a frequent critic of Nigeria's political class. In October 2025, after President Tinubu appointed a new head of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Peterside said on television that the commission under its previous chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, "was a national disgrace."

"A majority of Nigerians have lost confidence in both the electoral body and the judiciary," he said.