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Fidelity Bank wants to expand rapidly to become
one of the country’s top three lenders, growing organically and potentially
through acquisitions, its chief executive said on Friday.

Reginald Ihejiahi said the bank is still
interested in buying local rival Afribank, one of nine lenders rescued in a $4
billion bailout last year, even though it has picked a private equity
consortium as its preferred bidder.

“With regards to the Afribank transaction, I will
just say that these are early days yet. It’s a transaction we are still waiting
on,” Mr Ihejiahi told Reuters in an interview in the commercial capital Lagos.
“We will do an acquisition if the price is right, if the contractual terms are
right.”

Banking sources said last week that a consortium
of private equity investors had emerged as the preferred bidder for Afribank
with Fidelity as the reserve bidder but Afribank made it clear that it’s in
talks with potential investors but gave no details.

Industry sources estimate private equity bidders
would need to raise up to 30 billion naira to bring Afribank up to minimum
capital requirement levels after state-run “bad bank” AMCON absorbs all of its
non-performing loans.

AMCON was set up to help recapitalise the nine
rescued banks by absorbing their bad loans in an effort to restore lending in
sub-Saharan Africa’s second biggest economy. It will also buy margin loans from
across the wider banking sector.

Mr Ihejiahi said Fidelity had disclosed all of
its non-performing loans (NPLs) to AMCON and wanted to sell them “We want to
sell 100 percent, we have no reason not to do that … We have very little
margin loans, we have about 5 billion naira,” he said, adding that bank chiefs
had met with AMCON on Thursday to discuss the process.

“They said they would like to focus on margin
loans but (AMCON) has assured that before you get to the second quarter of 2011
they will have taken up all the NPLs,” Mr Ihejiahi said.

He said the bank expects to grow its branch
network to 200 branches from a current 181 before the second quarter of 2011
and that it planned to apply for an international banking licence by the end of
the year.

The central bank has said it will stop issuing
universal banking licences in a bid to avoid a repeat of last year’s near
collapse of several lenders which led to the bailout.

The regulator wants to separate banks’ core
lending business from more speculative capital markets activities — such as
stockbroking, asset management, private equity and venture capital — to
protect depositors’ funds.

Under the guidelines, lenders will now operate as
regional, national or international banks with varying minimum capital
requirements.

“We are asking for their approval for us to be a
commercial bank which has an international aspiration … We plan to put in our
application before the year runs out,” Mr Ihejiahi said, adding Fidelity would
sell subsidiaries as needed.