Speaking on how much UBA has grown since he led a group of young bankers to take over the bankrupt Crystal Bank, transform it into Standard Trust Bank, and then acquire UBA, Elumelu stated that “we are the only African bank that has a deposit-taking license in all of USA, we have today UBA UK, we have UBA, Paris and we just got a license for UBA, in Dubai”.
Mr. Elumelu further stated that his company, Heirs Oil and Gas, loses 50,000 barrels of crude oil every day to thieves.
Tony Elumelu made the remarks yesterday in Abuja when he delivered a lecture to members of Course 30 of the National Defence College on the theme: Strategic Leadership: My Business Experience.
Elumelu described theft in the Niger Delta as a national challenge. According to him, “we produce sometimes about 87,000 barrels per day, thieves take 50,000 per day and to me, this requires a national seminar or dialogue”.
“In my view, it is one of the highest levels of threat to our country because it’s so much money in the hands of people who don’t pay tax, people we don’t regulate, the country is not safe. They do that to us; they do that to other operators also.”
Nigeria in the last three quarters of last year, January to September he said, lost over $4 billion to thieves, “people who don’t pay tax” and they use the money realized from the oil heist to buy more lethal ammunition and pose threat to our corporate existence.
The activities of oil thieves he said “requires strategic leadership to deal with issues like this within the country but the lesson there is resilience in leadership.”
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”.
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”.
Next was that they “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, 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 Elumelu, “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”.
Strategic leadership Elumelu said, “is about seeing beyond today, it’s about setting a purpose, it’s about mobilizing, telling yourself the truth; what do I need, mobilizing your people, the right staff, the right mentoring, zero tolerance for what is not compatible”.
