Access Holdings takes over Standard Chartered Bank’s Angolan, Sierra Leonean assets

West Africa's biggest lender by assets is steadily deepening its foothold in Southern Africa, regarded as the continent’s most lucrative region for banking business.

Access Holdings completed the process of taking ownership of the Angolan operations of Standard Chartered Bank (StanChart), a multinational lender based in Britain but operating from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Its commercial banking division, Access Bank, delivered the purchase of the banking assets, Access Holdings said in a Wednesday statement, four months after announcing the deal.

Transactions targeting StanChart’s subsidiaries in the Gambia, Cameroon, as well as its consumer and private banking business in Tanzania, are to be finalised soon.

The new acquisitions come with the advantage that could help “strengthen the quality of our earnings from both countries by significantly growing our share of the Corporate and SME banking in the two markets,” said the chief executive of Access Bank, Roosevelt Ogbonna.

“The combinations represent another significant step towards our broader vision of becoming the World’s Most Respected African Bank,” Mr Ogbonna further stated.

West Africa’s biggest lender by assets is steadily deepening its foothold in Southern Africa, regarded as the continent’s most lucrative region for banking business.

Procuring StanChart’s unit in Angola, the region’s largest oil producer is strategic to firming up its grip on the market, crucial to its ambition of ranking among the top banks in the country in the next few years.

The lender already runs a local subsidiary called Access Bank Plc in the country.

StanChart’s determination to offload a good number of its banking assets matches Access Holdings’ hunger to scale at a time when the African Continental Free Trade Area is promising businesses unprecedented access to trade flows within Africa.

The London-based financial institution disclosed on Wednesday it is considering selling its wealth and retail banking operations in Zambia, Botswana and Uganda to finance “incremental investment in its leading wealth management business.”

In October, Mr Ogbonna said during a parley with journalists that Access Bank will issue its maiden dollar bond in two tranches in Nigeria beginning next year.