I opened an account with Sterling Bank, lured by their different approach to marketing. When you encounter Sterling on the streets of social media, they look like they were out to have fun, sometimes at the expense of competition, at other times, like they just want to play in the mischief market.
On this particular day, I was playing around on my workstation when I came upon a message asking to open an account with the bank while sitting at my desk. I followed this link, and an account number was sent to me in minutes. Although the documentation took a while before the account became operational, I loved the convenience it offered.
Many didn’t take Sterling Bank seriously when they launched their “One Customer Bank” campaign in May 2010. As a matter of fact, Sterling Bank was one of those banks that was the subject of endless rumours of extinction. A year before it launched this campaign, the bank was in a crippling loss position, making a loss of over N9 billion in that year. But it bounced back in the course of fiscal 2010 and was able to recover significantly to announce a profit of more than N4 billion.
Many who were paying attention at the time to the various manifestations of the campaign began to suspect that the project was not just for the optics but an inside-out campaign designed to not only alter employee attitudes, but also galvanise these to offer measurable values to the clientele, one customer after another.
The bigger picture was aimed at transforming the institution into a customer-centric entity, focusing on personalised service and providing integrated financial solutions to individual customers. The campaign marked a strategic shift towards holistic service delivery, and it became a defining moment for the bank’s brand identity, emphasising the dedication to understanding individual customer needs.
It is true that the CBN shoved its nose into the matter of poking competition and asked for a walk-back, indeed, the Christian Association of Nigeria and other Christians in Nigeria expressed righteous indignation over the Easter campaign, and Nigeria’s advertising regulator, ARCON announced it was going to sanction the bank, but what they didn’t know was that Sterling was bent on provoking conversations by those controversial adverts and remained in the memories of people for longer periods.
The account I opened with Sterling Bank was a learning experience for me, launching me into the institution through a self-service window through which I got hooked. The day I saw the bank’s account opening process online, I merely wanted to play with the technology, but the day my ATM card was delivered to me at home was when I strongly felt that the bank meant business.
I have since opened another account with them, having been sucked in by what I see as the leverage of technology and personalised service to deliver value for the customer. In 2025, the bank bravely declared itself a COT-free bank, removing all fees and commissions from transfers to the relief of customers. I guess this was what motivated me to opt into the bank.
I had increasingly become annoyed by the relentless determination of my former bank to be slicing off my bank balance, one small fund after another. They come in different names: stamp duty, account maintenance fee, SMS alert charge, VAT, Commission on NIP and other names.
During some very busy months, these deductions aggregate to significant sums of money. But Sterling Bank promised to relieve its customers of these fees and recently marked the first anniversary of zero transfer fees to its customers.
Rather than make money off customer transfers, Sterling said its focus was to become the enabler of transactions. In a market where fees had long been accepted as standard, enabled by regulators who kept reviewing upwards, not minding that the country was going through economic hardship, Sterling’s move challenged the status quo and reframed the relationship between banks and the people they served.
It became clear that banks which focused on what banks are established to do could make decent profits without burdening their customers. There is no banking customer in Nigeria who doesn’t harbour serious misgivings about the different transfer charges which banks impose on customers, and in certain branches, these fall into issues which employees on the customer service desks spend hours treating every day.
After one year, Sterling has measured the values delivered and announced that it had, in the course of one year, returned more than N2 billion to its customers.
“We made a deliberate decision to stop charging for the movement of money and to build our model around delivering real value instead. One year on, the outcome has validated both the principle behind that choice and the strength of the model itself,” said Abubakar Suleiman, chief executive officer of Sterling Bank.
Sterling Bank did not just roll out a campaign with a strange pay-off; it made the manifestation total, impacting people, technology and service. This bank is one of the greatest investors in technology, and has found a way to integrate this campaign into all aspects of its operations. Technology took the jobs normally performed by human beings. It reduced the costs associated with paper documentation and ultimately yielded reduced operational costs for the bank.
“Our transformation was never about technology for its own sake,” Suleiman also said of the one year of fee-free banking, “it was about building enduring capacity to serve, to scale, and ultimately to deliver more value to our customers. When that capacity matured, we made a conscious decision to return the benefits to the people who make the system work.”
The result is speaking through the numbers delivered by the bank in the 2025 financial year.
The HoldCo delivered strong performance, with full-year profit before tax rising 99 percent to ₦90.7 billion, driven by robust interest and non-interest income growth. The Group improved efficiency, reducing its cost-to-income ratio to 63 percent, while total assets increased 14 percent to ₦3.92 trillion.
Its gross earnings rose to ₦476.5 billion, a 46 percent increase from ₦326.82 billion in 2024. Total Assets grew by 14 percent to ₦3.92 trillion. The group also recorded a 127 percent year-on-year growth in profit after tax (PAT) by September 2025, reaching N62.3 billion, highlighting the success of its current strategic direction.
That the bank fully met its recapitalisation target quite early is proof the public is seeing the values the bank is delivering and have placed their bets on the leadership and the processes early. Its recapitalisation was completed via a private placement through which the sum of ₦75 billion in late 2024/early 2025, followed by a successful rights issue and an ₦88 billion Public Offer in October 2025.
Comfortable, happy and fulfilled with its performance and the outcomes of its strategic vision, the bank is set for its future, beginning from the year 2026. It wants to play in two aspects of banking, or what it calls the “OwnTwoBanks” initiative (commercial and non-interest banking). It is also looking to start a new subsidiary.
The bank is also interested in investing in the HEART of its business, with a long-term strategy looking at building and growing stakes in such fields as: Health, Education, Agriculture, Renewable Energy, and Transportation (HEART). It claims investments in these areas would help them to build a resilient and diversified portfolio. But if this is pushed to its ends, Sterling could become the bank that is closest to Nigerians, because the HEART initiative speaks to the everyday lives of people across market segments.
The bank aims to move from conventional banking to an AI-first institution to drive revenue, enhance operational efficiency, and provide superior customer satisfaction. This includes promoting a digital lending platform, called SPECTA, and launching local technology platforms like the one it calls SeaBaaS.
Sterling Bank is already ahead in sustainability with the game-changing transformation of its Lagos head office building into a massive solar power-generating house, after it clad the entire building with solar panels, relieving it of the burden of power-generating machines, noise and emission-related issues.
People who remember Sterling Bank as the little bank that was annoying First Bank, GTBank and Zenith Bank with provocative online campaigns, creating conversations with its Agege Bread joke during the Easter celebration of 2022, with the “He is risen” social media advert, are now thinking differently.
When it was poking fun at rival big banks, it was announcing that it was coming to challenge them, size-for-size, profitability-for-profitability. The bank has come of age and is looking set for a future of greater presence and influence in the market.
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Ikem Okuhu, a journalist, author, PR professional, brand strategist and teacher, is the Executive Producer of C-Suite Cafe podcast as well as CEO of BRANDish, publishers of BRANDish, Nigeria’s first nationally circulating Brands and Marketing magazine. He has a career that has traversed print media, oil & gas, banking and entrepreneurship. Ikem is the author of the book, “PITCH: Debunking Marketing’s Strongest Myths”, a dispassionate exposition of the dos and don’ts of successful engagement in the marketplace, especially the Nigerian marketplace. He can be reached on + 234 8095121535 (text only) or brandishauthority@gmail.com
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