First Bank of Nigeria Appoints Alebiosu MD for Times like This

For a banker dicing with risk in the 90s,  all he worried about included things that might go bang in the night. From competition and regulators. And when things got riskier in the 2000s, he and other risk officers then had more on their plates. Cyberattacks, culture clashes, climate changes, regional wars, data breaches, forex crisis, and disinformation. Mention it.

For Olusegun Alebiosu who’s seen it all over the decades, nothing can be more exciting than taking the helm now.

So when First Bank of Nigeria’s former MD Adesola Adeduntan took a bow for his retirement leave, and the bank appointed Alebiosu as acting MD, they set the stage.

Alebiosu’s career path  traversed the risk departments of many of the banks he worked with. And the experience he gathered over 28 years  across Coronation Merchant Bank, the African Development Bank Group, and United Bank of Africa might just have prepped him up for the task he just landed.

Especially in times like this.

Last July, Fitch Ratings analyzed Nigeria’s banking environment. Its report concluded that Nigerian banks face weaker capital ratios and higher impaired loans. Both fallouts of the reforms to liberalize the Nigerian naira and to remove the long-standing subsidy on fuel.

Mitigating these and other threats will surely tax most CROs. Now experience counts. And Alebiosu has an edge here—added core competence also in oil and gas, project financing, agriculture, shipping and aviation.

All of these are fallouts of years of academic and professional training across ivy leagues institutions of economic and business education.

Segun holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial relations and personnel management. He followed that with two master degrees in international law and diplomacy (UNILAG) and  development studies (LSE). Besides those, the banker holds a raft of other qualifications, including Advanced Management Programme from Harvard Business School.

He belongs to various professional bodies, too. He’s a Fellow, Institute of Chartered Accountants (FICA), Associate, Nigeria Institute of Management (ANIM), Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria (CIBN) and Member, Nigeria Institute of International Affairs.