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While the assets of Nigeria’s main pool of domestic institutional investment – pension funds – have grown rapidly since reform was enacted in 2006, their investment mix has remained very conservative, clustered overwhelmingly in government securities with a so-called risk-free rate of return, which funds have bought to hold. Indeed, asset growth has been driven by the...

THE COMPANY: Guaranty Trust Bank, with its many businesses covering Anglophone West Africa and the UK, has grown into one of Nigeria’s most respected and service-focused banks. The bank, along with its subsidiaries, is organised into three business segments: retail, corporate and commercial. It currently has over 29.43bn shares...

With issuance on the primary market remaining far below the levels seen during the heydays of the mid2000s, attracting new supply will be key if the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) is to meet its goal of a $1trn market capitalisation by 2016 – up from N12.14trn ($74.05bn) in early April 2015.

Fresh from a rebasing exercise in April 2014 that boosted 2013 GDP by 89% to $509.97bn, Nigeria now ranks not only as Africa’s most populous country, but also its largest economy. It has long played an outsized regional role, making up 76% of West Africa’s GDP and around 60% of its population. Despite concerns linked to short-term and cyclical risks, including unequal...

With regulatory reforms threatening to curb banks’ traditional sources of profit, lenders will need to create risk assets to maintain and expand their margins. Chief among these will be lending to retail customers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which carry significantly higher interest rates than the limited and heavily banked blue-chip corporate market....

Despite a housing gap estimated at 17m units, the provision of affordable long-term financing has remained virtually non-existent. By 2013 there were a mere 20,000 mortgages outstanding, according to the Ministry of Finance (MoF), at best-case interest rates of 19% over 10 years. In parallel to government efforts to promote the construction of more affordable housing,...