Customers’ deposit in top five banks, that is; Zenith Bank, United Bank for Africa (UBA), Access Bank, Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO) and Ecobank Transnational Incorporated (ETI), have continued to increase, rising by 17.2 per cent last year as profit after tax of the banks jointly rose by 23.2 per cent.
Deposits in the five banks, according to their 2021 audited report released to the investing public, rose from N27.43 trillion as at the end of 2020 financial year to N32.16 trillion with ETI leading on the deposit base with N8.36 trillion.
It is followed by Access Bank which has a deposit base of N6.96 trillion while Zenith, UBA and GTCO’s deposit base stood at N6.47 trillion N6.36 trillion and N4.01 trillion as at the end of the 2021 financial year.
As the banks’ deposit base grew, so also did their loan book which jointly grew by 15.4 per cent in the 2021 financial year to N16.05 trillion compared to N13.91 trillion that the five banks jointly had, at the end of the 2020 financial year.
Access Bank had the largest loan book as its loan to customers grew by more than N943 billion or 29.3 per cent to N4.161 trillion in 2021 compared to N3.21 trillion it had at the end of 2020. ETI had the second largest loan book with N4.06 trillion while Zenith, UBA and GTCO had N3.35 trillion, N2.68 trillion and N1.8trillion respectively on their loan books.
Jointly, the assets base of Zenith, GTCO, Access, UBA and ETI, at the end of the 2021 financial year, amounted to N46.8 trillion, a 16.5 per cent improvement over N40.28 trillion they jointly had at the end of the 2020 financial year.
Access Bank caught up with ETI in terms of assets base as the two banks had a total assets of N11.689 trillion each as at December 2021. Zenith Bank’s asset base had grown from N8.48 trillion in 2020 to N9.44 trillion at the end of the 2021 financial year.
The total assets of UBA had also grown to N8.54 trillion in 2021 compared to N7.69 trillion which it had as at December 31, 2020 while GTCO asset base stood at N5.43 trillion compared to N4.94 which it had in the comparable year of 2020.
In terms of profit, Zenith bank had the lion’s share of the N844.61 billion profit that the five banks recorded during the 2021 financial year. Zenith Bank’s profit after tax for the 2021 financial year stood at N244.55 billion, a 6.07 per cent increase in profit over N230.56 which it made in 2020.
GTCO, which had made a N201.43 billion profit in 2020, recorded a lower PAT in 2021 having declared N174.83 billion while Access Bank made a profit of N160.21 billion, a 51.2 per cent increase in profitability compared to N106.01 billion PAT it declared in 2020.
ETI PAT for the 2021 financial year stood at N146.32 billion a substantial improvement over N33.74 billion profit which it declared at the end of the 2020 financial year, while UBA recorded a PAT of N118.67 billion for the 2021 financial year.
