NOVA Merchant Bank, one of Nigeria’s premier Merchant Banks has reaffirmed its commitment in bridging Nigeria’s infrastructural gaps.
Nath Ude, chief executive officer and managing director of NOVA Merchant Bank, disclosed this during an interview with CNBC Africa monitored by our reporter recently.
Ude noted that their strategy is to bridge the huge infrastructural gap that currently exists in the country.
According to him, “As Merchant banks, we are supposed to bridge a huge gap, especially on the infrastructural side… there is a huge gap.
“Merchant banking is not sprint, it’s a marathon, so what we do is to actually identify infrastructural gap existing in the economy and see how we can help.
“For instance, if you know the size of the imports that happen in Nigeria, you would understand clearly that we literally import virtually everything, but we have capacity and what it takes to be able to start manufacturing these things ourselves.
“So what do we do? We identify infrastructural gaps – which we need to fund. These are areas that are long term in nature.
“We look at the manufacturing side – what are the things we need to manufacture, what are the things people need to do.
“I usually look at this to say, this is a huge opportunity for us as a nation and Merchant bank to step into our real core areas, which is to say, how do we become a huge partner in terms of bridging infrastructural gaps and i think this Covid-19 has created a huge opportunity for us to see the things we should be doing ourselves and that’s actually what we are doing.”
Speaking on the bank’s plans for the second half of the year, Ude said that the bank is focusing on the impact it’s bringing to the table rather than profitability.
He said, “For the second part of the year, I want to talkless about profitability… I really want to focus on the impact we should be bringing to the table as opposed to measuring our growth by PBT,” he said.
“Profit before tax (PBT) is very good, we have done good work, but honestly, we want to measure ourselves with impacts we are bringing to the table.
The CEO while providing insight on its financing plan, revealed that the company strategically took advantage of a bond to match funds with long term investment.
“We took huge advantage, a bond. We will use it to go into core long term infrastructural areas.
“It has helped us in terms of planning, in terms of matching of funds, matching long term funds we are receiving with long term investment.
“This was a strategy from NOVA Merchant bank and it’s the style we want to adopt for the rest of the year”, he concluded.
“It was actually N50 billion bond. We have done the first 10 billion.
“In the coming months, we are going to taking up second and third. It has helped us with planning and matching long term funds – with long term investment.
“It was a strategy for NOVA, and it is a style we want to adopt for the rest of the year. We will be doing a lot of fund matching .”
