BY PETER EGWUATU

A custom officer, Mr. Hyginus Akanoku has become the latest winner of the Diamond Bank Plc’s salary for life promo held for the month of April, 2011.

There is no doubt that a good percentage of the money in circulation is trapped in the informal sector. Many banks have recently launched programmes in the bid to attract the funds outside the banking system and channel it towards growing the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs).

One of such initiative is Diamond Bank SavingsXtra product, a unique product plan with immense reward by the bank, which not only encourages savings culture among Nigerians, but is crucial in the growth of Nigeria’s economy.

Little wonder Diamond Bank Plc has continued to put smiles on the faces of its customers since it began its savings promo tagged ““Salary for  Life.”  With his emergence, Ahanoku who is a staff officer Operations, Custom Command, Zone A, Idiroko, Ogun State, will be receiving N100, 000 monthly for the next 20 years.

In the case of Ahanotu,  he became a costumer of the Bank last year during the bank’s marketing programme at Idiroko in Ogun State.

The SavingsXtra “Salary for Life” is a continuation of the Bank’s pay back scheme  it recently launched to reward its customers. The Bank made history in the first phase of the campaign when it gave away a whooping sum of N50 million to two of its customers as the star prize.

Other salary for life winners had included Amadi Cordelia, an Abuja based housewife, Egbe Stephen Mary of Maiduguri Shehu Laminu way branch in Bornu State and Ikechukwu Nwahiri of Benin Mission Road branch in Edo State .others included Princewill Aguta, a roadside welder at Orji, a suburb of Owerri, the Imo State capital and Peace Onyemaechi, a stock fish seller at Oyingbo market in Lagos who the recently drawn

Season 3 promo. It would be recalled that James Umaru Mbugadu, a civil servant from Nasarawa State, last year became  the first person to be presented with the promo’s N50million star prize cheque. Mbugadu then said he planned to disengage gradually from the civil service and go into private business. A 100-level Language and Linguistics student at University of Maiduguri, Habiba Mona Saliu, was the second person.

There was also Adamu Abdullahi of Nigerian Prisons Service (NPS) who won N10million as well as Samuel Zouglo, a cook at Sheraton Hotel & Towers, Ikeja, Lagos who won a brand new Toyota Camri car, among many others who won different prizes.