Team size: 25

What are the most significant cases or transactions your legal team has recently been involved in?

Over the past year, our work has been anchored around capital optimisation, balance-sheet risk management, regulatory engagement, and strategic transformation, while maintaining disciplined governance and control standards across the Bank. The team has been instrumental in structuring and advising on deals of no less than US$500 m. in Y2025.

On material transactions, we supported a number of complex financing, restructuring and risk-transfer initiatives, including workstreams aimed at optimising risk-weighted assets and improving capital ratios. The Bank remains one of the banks in Nigeria that has met the regulator’s new capital requirements for commercial banks with national license and the Legal team was actively involved throughout that process.

We have also been actively involved in cross-border documentation and negotiation for treasury and funding-related arrangements, including international-standard master agreements and supporting documentation for hedging, collateralisation, and counterparty risk management. Where appropriate, we ensured that deal execution aligned with the Bank’s internal credit governance, regulatory expectations, and enforceability requirements under Nigerian law.

From a governance and transformation standpoint, we provided end-to-end legal and company secretariat support for Board and Committee processes relating to the Bank’s operating model changes and efficiency initiatives, including approvals, implementation oversight, and the documentation of director deliberations for auditability and regulatory defensibility. In parallel, we supported enterprise-wide policy refresh initiatives, including updates to key internal frameworks, to reflect evolving regulatory expectations and business realities.

On litigation and dispute resolution, the team has continued to manage a portfolio of litigation and recovery matters, particularly banker- customer disputes; credit-related disputes; employer-employee disputes; property-related disputes and enforcement actions, ensuring proactive strategic handling of disputes and providing the best possible defence for the Bank through engagement of the most experienced commercial attorneys to defend its cases, and extinguish or reduce the monetary damages attributable to such cases. The team also ensures effective litigation monitoring; deployment of subject matter experts as witnesses; procurement of third-party independent audits, opinions, and case reviews to assess possible outcomes and provisioning needs; effective utilisation of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms; appropriate external counsel oversight, with a focus on early risk containment, reputational safeguards, and pragmatic settlement where commercially sensible. So far, the Bank has averaged an 85% win ratio in litigation cases in the last 3 years.

What role does corporate counsel play in strengthening corporate governance in light of Nigeria’s recent reforms and stakeholder expectations?

In a regulated financial institution, corporate in-house counsel is central to embedding governance as an operating discipline rather than a periodic compliance exercise. Practically, this means translating reforms and stakeholder expectations into boardroom mechanics: clear mandates and charters, robust decision records, disciplined conflicts management, and measurable accountability for management actions. We ensure that Board and Committee materials are framed to support informed challenge, and that outcomes are documented in a manner that is both operationally useful and regulatory-defensible.

Corporate counsel also serves as the integrator across functions, bridging business objectives with risk, compliance, audit and regulatory affairs, so that governance is coherent across product, credit, technology, people and conduct. In today’s environment, counsel’s role increasingly includes anticipatory governance: horizon scanning, scenario assessment, and advising management on how emerging regulatory or conduct expectations may affect business strategy before they crystallise into supervisory findings.

How is your legal team navigating Nigeria’s evolving regulatory compliance requirements, particularly under CAMA 2020, ISA 2025, and Central Bank directives?

Our approach is structured around three levers: (i) governance-by-design, (ii) regulatory change management, and (iii) evidence.

First, we align approvals, delegations, documentation standards and reporting routines with the Bank’s governance architecture so that compliance is not “bolted on” after decisions are taken.

Second, we run a practical change-management process, mapping regulatory updates to impacted products/processes, assigning owners, refreshing policies/controls, and tracking implementation to closure with management attestations.

Third, we prioritise evidence: the ability to demonstrate compliance through auditable records, board papers, minutes, registers, filings, approvals, training records, and control testing outputs. For CAMA-related obligations, this includes maintaining statutory registers and timely filings, and ensuring appropriate corporate actions are properly authorised and documented. For capital markets and investment-related obligations, we work closely with the relevant functions to ensure that disclosures, approvals and documentation protocols remain aligned with applicable securities rules and stakeholder expectations. For Central Bank directives, we focus on supervisory readiness, ensuring that regulatory requirements are translated into operational controls, and that control gaps are remediated promptly with clear ownership and timelines.

How is your legal department leveraging technology to improve compliance monitoring, contract management, or governance reporting?

We are progressively digitising the legal and governance workflow to improve speed, consistency, and oversight. Key focus areas include (i) standardisation of templates and legal documentation to reduce drafting variance and accelerate negotiation, (ii) structured matter tracking to improve visibility across litigation, perfection of securities and advisory work, and (iii) governance reporting enhancements, so that Board and Committee outputs can be tracked against action owners and timelines with greater discipline.

In parallel, we continue to strengthen our record management and retrieval to support client’s needs and supervisory examinations. The overarching objective is not merely automation, but better control: clearer accountability, improved data integrity, faster turnaround times, and stronger assurance that obligations, regulatory, contractual, and governance-related, are monitored and met.