The United Bank for Africa (UBA) has been granted license to operate a bank in Dubai.
Recalling how big UBA has grown from when he led some young bankers to take over distressed Crystal bank transforming it to Standard Trust Bank and later acquiring UBA, Elumelu stated that “we are the only African bank that has deposit taking license in all of USA, we have today UBA UK, we have UBA, Paris and we just got license for UBA, in Dubai”.
He said the team that transformed Standard Trust Bank to UBA today wanted to make a statement that “out of Africa, out of Nigeria you can do businesses successfully, and can do business in various environments anywhere in the world, today that experiment or dream has come to life”.
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The team Elumelu said created their own three tiers strategy for success by first turning Crystal Bank “attractive to people so that people can enter the bank to bank. So, we did that, so we democratized banking”.
He continued: “We made sure that while some banks then were accepting N50,000 to open a current account, we dropped to N5,000 for corporate, personal N1,000, and in fact at some point we dropped to zero balance to open an account. Those things are happening today”.
The next step he said was the second-tier strategic intent for success which was to become one of the top 10 banks in the country. The final and the third-tier strategic intent was that they wanted to become one of the top three banks in Nigeria, “and we worked hard towards it”.
According to him, “we started seeing people coming into the banking hall, we were measuring success by the number of people who came to transact and not necessarily the naira we were making and we were happy that people were coming”.
“We got to the third tier seven years after taking over Crystal bank then we said how do we now move to that number one position and that was what led us to the merger of Standard Trust Bank with UBA, we achieved that in a record time, less than 10 years”.
