A Banker’s Letter to Nigeria’s Financial Future

There is a photograph of me from 2012 that I kept on my phone, not out of vanity, but as a useful reminder of what it felt like to stand at the beginning of something.

In it, I am smiling the smile of someone who is trying to look more certain than she feels. I had just completed my first major campaign shoot as the face of Diamond Bank, a role that, at the time, felt larger than I was ready for. The campaign was ambitious. The bank was ambitious. Nigeria, in those months, felt ambitious, a country on the edge of something, reaching.

I am writing this nine years later, with considerably more grey hair and considerably more miles on the roads that connect Lagos, Ibadan to Sagamu to Osun to the kind of communities where this industry’s real work gets done. And I want to share some things: not prescriptions, not formulas, but honest reflections on what those years have taught me about banking, about Nigeria, and about what it truly means to add value to a society.

That journey, and the recognition it has attracted, have been humbling. Earlier this year ,When the National Youth Council of Nigeria honored me with the Distinguished Youth Professional of Banking & Commerce , it was a validation of what grassroots financial inclusion work can accomplish when it is done with sincerity and sustained effort. I share this not out of pride, but because awards like these belong, in truth, to every market woman, every village farmer, and every young person who trusted us enough to engage.

On Being Seen

In 2012 and 2013, I entered the face of Diamond Bank Contest. The campaign we were working on was doing something genuinely radical for Nigerian banking at the time. It was saying, in images and in language, that “Banking belongs to everybody; that a woman who sells in the market, a student writing her WAEC exams, an artisan in Nnewi: these are our customers. These are the faces of Nigerian finance.”

I took that message to the letter. Not because it was the campaign brief, but because I believed it. I had watched my own mother, a schoolteacher who ran a small provisions side-business, navigate the frustrations of Nigerian banking: the queues, the forms, the condescension that sometimes lived in the space between a counter and a customer. I understood viscerally that the financial system was not designed with her in mind. And I felt a responsibility, in that public role, to push against that.

What I did not fully understand at the time was how that public-facing experience would transform my private professional priorities. Standing in front of millions of Nigerians as the embodiment of what accessible banking could look like made me permanently impatient with the gap between aspiration and reality. It made me someone who, when I walked into our divisional monthly strategy meeting, always asked, “What does this mean for the woman in the market? For the farmer in the village? For the young man in Ajegunle who has never been inside a bank branch in his life?” That impatience has not always made me easy to work with. I am told I ask too many questions. I can live with that.

On Market Women: The Economy’s Invisible Architects

The most important professional education I have received took place in the markets of Lagos, Ogun State, Oyo State, and half a dozen other places where I spent days, sometimes weeks, sitting with market women, listening to them describe their financial lives.

Those conversations revealed a sophisticated, resilient, and entirely unrecognised financial ecosystem. Ajo (age-old rotational or contribution method used for savings) groups that provided zero-interest liquidity to members in emergencies. Informal credit systems that extended loans based on reputation and community accountability, with default rates that would make a commercial banker weep with envy. Women managing stock, receivables, and cash flow across multiple suppliers and customers simultaneously, without a single spreadsheet, with an accuracy that would humble most analysts.

These women were not waiting to be financially empowered. They were already financially powerful. They needed a formal system to recognise that power and meet them where they were.

The work I did supporting the Diamond Bank community programme and later the Keystone Bank market outreach initiative was not charity work. It was market development work that identified an underserved segment of enormous economic potential and designed the products, processes, and engagement models that could serve them well.

Madam Bolous, a provisions trader I met in Omida Market in Abeokuta, Ogun State and who had since become one of the programme’s most passionate champions, captured it better than I ever could when she said, “You didn’t come to help us. You came to do business with us. That is why we trusted you.” I have never received a more meaningful professional compliment.

On Training Young People

I want to talk about the youth’s financial literacy work, because it is the part of my career that makes me most optimistic about Nigeria’s future, and the part that most reveals the consequences of our failures.

When I walk into a secondary school classroom and ask students who can explain what a savings account is, the range of responses tells the entire story. Some students have been raised in households where money is discussed openly, where parents model saving behaviour, explain the difference between needs and wants, and treat financial education as a normal part of preparation for adulthood. Others have never had a single conversation about money at home and have absorbed, by osmosis, a variety of myths and anxieties about finance that will take years to undo.

The sessions my team has run in Lagos, Ibadan in Oyo, and Ogun States are designed to meet students wherever they are and give them something immediately usable; that is a savings account on their phone before they leave the room; a simple budget they can apply to their weekly pocket money; an understanding of compound interest that reframes saving from a sacrifice into an investment.

But beyond the mechanics, what I most want to give young Nigerians is a sense of agency: the conviction that financial outcomes are not things that happen to them but things they can shape in meaningful ways. Nigeria has a habit of making its young people feel like passengers in their own country. Every young person I can reach with the message that they have economic power, that their savings matter, that their habits matter, that their choices hold sway, is a small act of resistance against that habit.

Mr Taiye (last name unavailable), a 25-year-old I met at a session in Ibadan who now runs a small reselling business and saves 30 per cent of his profit monthly, told me, “I didn’t know money could work for you. I always thought you just spend it until it finishes.”

Banking the Unbanked and What It Actually Takes

Sometimes, people congratulate me on the “Banking the Unbanked” village outreach work as though it were an act of altruism. I want to correct that impression.

Going into rural communities to build financial inclusion is one of the most professionally rewarding things I have ever done. And I say with complete conviction that it is also one of the best business decisions any Nigerian bank can make. The communities we reached in Ogun, Oyo and Osun ,  States represent enormous, largely untapped economic potential. The farmers, traders, and small-scale producers living there are a customer base.

The work required patience, cultural intelligence, and a willingness to design from the ground up rather than parachuting in with a product built for someone else. We saw the need to recruit and empower community members as banking agents. And it required a long-term commitment: not a one-time market activation, but a sustained presence that builds genuine trust.

The communities where we had done this work well were beginning to show what financial inclusion looked like at scale such as cooperative savings groups accessing formal credit for the first time; women reinvesting profits in their businesses rather than losing cash to theft; young people entering the formal economy with bank accounts and financial habits in place before they leave their villages. These are changing lives.

What I Know Now

If I could go back and speak to the woman in that 2012 photograph, nervous and certain, smiling a smile she had to practice, this is what I would tell her that the most important currency in this industry is trust. And trust is not built through advertising campaigns or branch openings or product launches. It is built through thousands of small acts of integrity. It is the conversation in the market that is honest even when honesty is inconvenient; the session in the village that stays an extra two hours because people still have questions; the young woman in the training programme who you stay behind to help long after the other facilitators have left.

This industry can change Nigeria through the accumulation of those small acts. Each account opened is a small piece of someone’s economic freedom. Each youth session is a small shift in how a generation thinks about money. Each village programme is a small broadening of who the formal economy considers worthy of participation.

Small is how large change begins. I believe that now, more than I believed anything in 2012. The photograph stays on my phone. It reminds me of where I started. The work I am still doing reminds me how far there is to go.

Adetorera Obimakinde,

A senior banking officer, financial inclusion advocate, and trainer,

Writes from Abeokuta, Ogun State