The Managing Director of Enterprise Bank, Ahmed Kuru, has said that the bank will by October this year be ready for new investor.
Kuru who spoke during an interface with journalists on the bank’s development since it was nationalised in 2011, said the management of the bank was now ready to transfer the bank to new investor in October as directed by AMCON.
Enterprise Bank, formerly known as Spring Bank before it was nationalised, was among the three distressed banks nationalised by AMCON on Aug. 8, 2011. The other two banks are Mainstreet Bank (formerly Afribank) and Keystone Bank (Bank PHB).
“For us, we have achieved quite a lot when we came in because it was a fifty-fifty chance, but we turn around the bank within a year. In the last there years, a lot of things have happened to improve its banking services and adhere to regulations.
“We have been able to turn around the bank in the line of profitability, enhanced the quality of its workforce, upgraded the bank’s technology and processes,” Kuru said.
He said that the bank was not bothered by the new investors, adding that the change of ownership is not a new thing. “All banks in Nigeria are for sale. Transactions on bank stocks at Nigerian Stock Exchange have continued to increase.
“We are now looking for core investors. We have also increase in terms of size, deposits and earnings. We are very happy that at the end of the day we are going to hand over a strong, reliable and profitable bank to new investors,” he said.
He said that the bank had grown its deposit to 80 per cent, while its profitability grew by 60 per cent, adding that the bank had recorded increased returns on equity.
He said that the bank’s loans portfolio grew from N5 billion in 2011 to N76 billion in 2013, adding that bank planned to achieve N130 billion loan portfolio by December and assured that the bank could now favourably compete with its counterparts in the country.
According to him, the management has been able to re-engineer the bank professionally and commercially through the delivery of better services.
Kuru stressed that the bank was not interested in ‘size game’, adding that the banking industry of today was not about branches, but about e-banking.
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