Amidst decrease in domestic investors’ participation at the Nigerian Stock Exchange, (NSE) institutional investors have continued to dominate activity in the domestic space in the capital market compared to contribution by their retail counterpart. Recent figure released by the NSE on percentage of contribution by domestic institutional and retail investors for the month of December, 2015 showed significant decline in the total contribution by retail investors.

In a communiqué signed by President of the Association, Mr. Uju Ogubunka, and Executive Secretary, Onyema Okoroh, the Association called on the CBN to, “ Withdraw the Circular introducing the fee and allow bank customers to enjoy the free COT regime; Avoid legalising illegality of Account Maintenance Fee; Avoid replacing COT with Account Maintenance Fee; Direct banks that had charged Account Maintenance fees not only to stop such charges but also to refund all the money they had collected from their customers since the introduction of the Guide to Bank Charges in 2004 (16 years); Endeavour to consult stakeholders before the introduction of charges/fees foreign to the subsisting Revised Guide to Bank Charges.”

Our corporate strategy and the vision of the bank states that we want to build and transfer wealth across generations. The SMEs are part of that strategy. If you focus on the SMEs, it means you have to meet with entrepreneurs at the incubation stage of their business. And if you are to help them grow and become very big and successful, that means you will be able to transfer wealth from one generation to the other.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) weekend said that the telecommunications sector contributed N 1,385.85 billion to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the third quarter of 2015, adding that the subscriber base of service providers rose by 16.15 million. The NBS report stated that “In September 2015, at the end of the third quarter, there were a total of 148,427,423 GSM subscribers divided across the four networks of Airtel, Etisalat, Globacom and MTN. This figure is slightly 0.19 per cent lower than in August when there were 148,703,160 subscribers, the first monthly decline since July 2014.

Amidst several projections of challenging economy in the year 2016 by many economists and the International Monetary Fund, IMF, the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, has outlined its own position on all key economic indicators, not just for 2016 but also in the next four years to 2019. The projections covers the annual growth rate of real Gross Domestic Products, GDP, annual Inflation rate, and the annual growth rate of the Value of Total Trade, VTT.