First Bank of Nigeria Limited (FirstBank) has solidified its position as Nigeria’s premier corporate and retail banking giant, winning two prestigious honors at the 2026 Euromoney Awards for Excellence held in London.
The tier-1 banking powerhouse was crowned:
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Nigeria’s Best Bank for Customer Experience
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Nigeria’s Best Bank for Large Corporates
According to Euromoney, its annual Awards for Excellence remain the definitive global benchmark for the banking industry, identifying institutions that demonstrate exceptional differentiation, pioneering service, and structural financial strength.
The double-trophy haul serves as an important validation of FirstBank’s long-term capital formation strategy and its continuous efforts to drive commercial prosperity across Africa.
Reinventing the Customer Experience Engine
The recognition of FirstBank as Nigeria’s Best Bank for Customer Experience is the direct result of a multi-year digital transformation. Under its legacy Primus transformation program, the lender integrated advanced artificial intelligence and robotic process automation (RPA) into its back-office operations.
By automating manual paper trails and streamlining account reconciliation cycles, the bank successfully accelerated transaction turnaround times, expanded its active customer base past 36 million accounts, and achieved massive cost savings.
This technical efficiency has been heavily supported by FirstMonie, the bank’s market-leading agent banking network. Boasting over 180,000 agents actively deployed across all 774 local government areas in Nigeria, FirstBank has bridged the financial inclusion gap, delivering reliable retail services to remote communities and ensuring a consistent customer experience at scale.
Powering Large Corporates
In the wholesale banking segment, FirstBank secured the Best Bank for Large Corporates title by deploying customized, high-volume digital portals.
At the core of this corporate offering is FirstDirect 2.0, an advanced, smart transaction banking platform. The system provides corporate treasures with a single, end-to-end online dashboard to manage payments, collections, liquidity, and supply chain financing.
By supplying large enterprises with custom API toolkits to integrate directly into their enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, FirstBank has locked in dominant transactional relationships. This wholesale focus has driven stellar corporate banking returns, with the division’s loan book expanding past ₦3.6 trillion to support crucial infrastructure, modular power plants, and industrial manufacturing clients nationwide.
These international awards provide positive momentum for FirstBank’s parent company, FirstHoldCo Plc, as institutional investors continue to accumulate shares ahead of its upcoming Q2 financial results.
By backing up its massive ₦3.96 trillion market capitalization with tangible, internationally recognized operational excellence, the financial powerhouse is demonstrating that its structural turnaround is fully complete.
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