One of Nigeria’s top lenders, Diamond Bank is in talks to buy a specialized Bank in Europe, to foster investments between Nigeria and Europe to increase its earnings. Diamond Bank will take the provenance advantage for the bank and investments, than going to have a small office in Europe like a number of banks in Africa and Asia do. Diamond has had a good fiscal year, expecting 18% return on equity and a pretax profit of 30 billion naira.
The name of the European Bank is yet to be disclosed, but Diamond Bank said that the deal has been cleared by the Central Bank of Nigeria and it will not borrow to finance the transaction.
Speaking to Reuters on the move, Diamond Bank’s CEO Alex Otti said: “We are not looking at buying a high street bank. It’s going to be a specialized bank that will complement our services. We have a lot of business flows in that direction (Europe) and we use third parties to do those …we strongly believe that if we are successful, it will add value to the bank.”
