![Dr Muhammad Ali Pate, CEO of Gavi Alliance. [PHOTO CREDIT: Twitter handle of Atiku Abubakar]](https://i0.wp.com/media.premiumtimesng.com/wp-content/files/2023/02/Dr-Muhammad-Ali-Pate.jpeg?fit=1080%2C720&ssl=1)
On 21 April, 1917, an institution opened its doors to a country that did not yet exist in the form it would take today. Nigeria had no central bank, no national currency, and arguably no domestic financial institution capable of writing the kind of credit a young economy would need to build itself. The bank that opened that year, then known as the Colonial Bank, would in time become Union Bank of Nigeria. One hundred and nine years later, we still hold open the same door on the Marina in Lagos, on behalf of the same country, for a generation of Nigerians whose grandparents may have walked into our branches before independence.
This is not a celebration of age. It is an account of work.
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For more than a century, Union Bank has financed the building of Nigeria in the literal sense. We were among the institutions that wrote credit for the railways, the ports, the textile mills, the cocoa boards, and the housing schemes that shaped the country’s earliest modern economy. We banked the merchants of Kano and the traders of Onitsha, the cooperatives of Ibadan and the engineers of Port Harcourt, long before banking in Nigeria was a competitive industry.
Today, we serve our millions of customers across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, through a branch network of almost 280 locations. We hold the deposits, salaries, and school fees of Nigerian families in every region, and we have financed tens of thousands of small and medium enterprises: the businesses that form the backbone of employment wherever Nigerians are working to build something.
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Banks tend to speak about themselves in the language of products and quarters. We want to speak today in a different register.
Nigeria’s most enduring economic activity has never been concentrated in the firms whose names move indices. It lives in the market corridors and processing sheds, the fabrication workshops and the family farms, the trading houses that have operated on trust across three generations. Long before the financial services industry began speaking about inclusion as a strategy, Union Bank had made a different and more fundamental choice: to serve the overwhelming majority of Nigerians rather than only the comfortable few at the top. These are the constituencies that a bank with a 109-year horizon must understand at a depth that goes beyond product design.
Union Bank has banked this economy, not as a strategic aspiration, but as a sustained practice: through the cooperatives of the Middle Belt, the commodity traders of the North, the light manufacturers of the SouthWest, and the trade networks of the South-South and SouthEast. Not because it was fashionable to do so, but because these were always the businesses actually building Nigeria, long before the vocabulary of financial inclusion existed.
We have always understood that the strength of a bank is not measured in any single year. It is measured in the steadiness of its presence across generations: in whether it is still standing, still serving, and still trusted long after the circumstances that once defined it have changed. It is measured by time itself and all the whims and caprices that come with it.
What has kept Union Bank standing for 109 years is not scale alone, nor the particular products of any era. It is the discipline of an institution that has consistently placed its obligation to its customers and to this country above the pursuit of the moment. That discipline is not proclaimed. It is evidenced:
109 years of unbroken operational continuity and excellence, because Nigerians have continued to entrust us with their savings, their salaries, their school fees, their business loans, and their futures.
That trust is not abstract. It is visible in the customers who have banked with us across two and three generations of the same family, in the businesses that opened their first accounts with us decades ago and have never left, and in the steady growth of the people who choose us; not because they have no other option, but because a relationship built over time earns a loyalty that products alone cannot.
In the year ahead, we will expand our financing of small and medium enterprises, with a deliberate focus on the agricultural value chains of Northern Nigeria, the manufacturing clusters of the Southwest, and the trade corridors of the Southeast and South-south. We will deepen our digital infrastructure so that a market trader in Maiduguri can transact with the same speed as a corporate treasurer in Victoria Island.
We will continue to invest in touchpoints that enable us to be present in places where banking is not yet convenient, because presence itself is a form of trust. And we will continue to do this work as what we have always been: a Nigerian institution, serving a Nigerian economy, with the patience that only a 109-year horizon permits.
To the millions of Nigerians who have walked through our doors across the decades, who have saved with us, borrowed from us, and built businesses with our backing: Thank you. To the staff who carry this institution every day, in 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory: Thank you. To the country whose name we have carried for over a century:
We are still here. We are still building. We are still Nigerian.
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