GTCO, First HoldCo crash in 2026 banking rankings; Zenith, Access buck slide

Zenith Bank and Access Holdings have outperformed GTCO, First HoldCo and some of Africa’s biggest financial institutions in the newly released 2026 edition of the 300 Finance Champions, an annual ranking of Africa’s leading banking and insurance players published by Jeune Afrique and The Africa Report.

While South Africa’s Standard Bank topped the ranking of the best-performing pan-African banking groups, Zenith Bank came second, and Kenya’s NCBA placed third. Other Nigerian lenders, including GTCO, United Bank for Africa and First HoldCo, fell in the rankings.

GTCO, which topped the 2025 ranking, dropped nine places to 10th position, while UBA fell from fifth to 18th. First HoldCo, which ranked 12th last year, slid to the bottom of this year’s ranking.

The report attributed the poor performance to revised recapitalisation requirements in Nigeria, noting the “end of windfall gains linked to naira fluctuations and stricter rules on accounting for nonperforming loans.”

It said that these factors had weighed on banks’ financial results, even as Zenith Bank and Access Holdings weathered the pressures and bucked the decline through geographical diversification, strategic planning and cost control.

“Strategies based on anticipation, geographical diversification and cost control have enabled some groups, such as Zenith Bank and Access Holdings, to hold up better,” the report stated.