Pink Was Never the Point

An open letter to Nigeria’s female bank MDs

International Women’s Day falls on March 8th. My birthday is March 9th. So it is a day I typically take time to reflect. March 9th is the day those  corporate headshots of women are tidied away and we go back to how life was on March 7th — but I am a year older and my thinking a little clearer.

This year I want to use that clarity to write a letter. Not a general one about how far women in finance have come — though we have, and it deserves a moment. A specific letter, to specific women: the managing directors of Nigeria’s commercial banks, many of whom are now women.

The first thing I want to do is thank you for killing the pink accounts. The She-accounts, HerMoney branding, the products that were essentially existing instruments with a different colour scheme. You understood, I hope, that slapping pink on a broken system does not make it female-friendly. It makes it condescending.

But killing the pink account was the easy part. Here is the harder question.

What She Said With Pride

I have started recording conversations for  Nidacity’s  podcast — talking to people doing interesting things in Nigeria’s economy, getting them to tell their stories. Yesterday  I sat with a  bubbly 39-year-old who has done something remarkable. She  built a multi-billion naira business from scratch in a sector where capital intensity matters  buildings, inventory, patience measured in years, not months.

I asked about financing. Her answer was immediate and, in its tone, almost defiant: she had never borrowed. Not once. Grown entirely from retained earnings, reinvesting what the business produced back into itself. She said it the way you say something you are proud of.

I understood the pride. I felt it too — reflexively, in the way women of a certain formation feel it. Debt-free. Self-reliant. Beholden to no one.

Then I sat with it a little longer. A more complicated feeling arrived.

The Man in the Same Room

Think about what a man with the same business, the same talent, and the same ten years would have done.

He would have borrowed. Early, probably. He would have leveraged before it was comfortable, used someone else’s capital to accelerate what was possible and grown at two or three times the speed. Not because he was smarter. Not because his business plan was better. But because the relationship between men and debt — in the cultures I have moved through— is structurally different.

Men are broadly taught to treat debt as a tool. Women are broadly taught to treat it as a risk. Both are true. But one framing produces a multi-billion business in twenty years; the other, the same business in ten — worth four times as much today.

I am not saying she was wrong. I am saying the pride she felt — and that I felt, briefly, on her behalf — was worth examining.

What I Learned

I’ve spent years in finance. I’ve sat in rooms where large sums moved with a casualness I found startling. The confidence with which men leveraged balance sheets and borrowed to build was not recklessness — it was a trained comfort with capital as an instrument rather than a resource to be guarded.

I noticed, in myself and in the few other women in those rooms, a residual caution that was not purely analytical. It was cultural. Borrowed, if you will, from somewhere earlier — from the way we had been raised to think of money as finite and precarious, to be preserved rather than deployed.

That instinct has genuine value. Women-led businesses carry lower default rates on average. They survive longer. The discipline is real.

But discipline and ambition are not the same thing.

Dear Madam MD

The banks you lead were designed — in their products, their collateral requirements, their risk models — around a borrower who was rarely female. The typical loan product does not account for a female entrepreneur who holds no land in her own name, because land passes through male lines in many cultures. It does not account for a woman with no formal credit history — not because she has been irresponsible, but because she has been responsible in a system that did not record her. It does not account for the possibility that her pride in never having borrowed is itself a symptom of exclusion, dressed up as virtue.

The woman who has never borrowed is not a puzzle to be solved. She is a market waiting to be served.

My guest built something remarkable without you. But imagine what she might have built if, ten years ago, a bank had reached her on her own terms — products calibrated to how she actually builds, not how the system assumed she should. What if her natural aversion to default were treated as an asset: faster repayment, lower risk, no penalties for early settlement?

Different, Not Deficient

I am not saying women should borrow more. The caution women bring to capital is not pathology — in many environments, it is wisdom. The 2008 financial crisis was in no small part a failure of exactly the leveraged confidence I described admiringly above. The AMCON debtor list had no pink on it.

The female growth model — patient, organic, equity-funded, relationships-first — is different from the dominant model. Different, not deficient. And the institutions you now lead have for decades treated that difference as a credit risk rather than a business opportunity.

The women building quietly — accumulating slowly, reinvesting patiently, growing without leverage because leverage was never offered in a form they could trust — are absent from your default rate statistics because they were never in your loan book. They are not in your portfolio because your portfolio was not designed to hold them.

You can change that. You are, now, the person with the power to change it. Not by imposing a model on women who have built something real. But by asking, seriously, what credit products would look like if they were designed around the way women actually build — with cash flow, not title deeds, as the measure of creditworthiness.

That is a different bank from the one you inherited. Whether you build it is the question I am leaving with you.

Happy Women’s Day, a little late. And thank you for swivelling in those seats.

Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She writes from Lagos.