Despite the prohibitively high price tag proposed last year, an acquisition of South African lender Nedbank by the UK’s Standard Chartered could still be possible. Buying a bank in Nigeria, on the other hand, appears to be much less likely for Standard Chartered, at least in the short to medium term.
As Standard Chartered is one of the smaller banks in Nigeria, some have speculated that it might be among the bidders for the nine troubled banks Nigeria’s central bank has tried to sell to foreign institutions. Elsewhere, Standard Chartered has top-five positions by assets in some of sub-Saharan Africa’s most important markets – although this excludes South Africa, where the bank also has only a very small market share.
| "We have to ask what the problem is we are trying to solve in a potential acquisition; whether we are solving someone else’s problem, or whether we are solving our own problem" Vis Shankar, Standard Chartered |
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In an interview with Euromoney, Vis Shankar, Standard Chartered’s Dubai-based chief executive for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas, denies that the firm has formally expressed an interest in acquiring one of the nine troubled Nigerian banks.
