To make out time of the busy schedule of Uzoma Dozie, the youthful Managing Director of Diamond Bank, is like squeezing water out of a stone. But once cornered, the technologically savvy and business oriented banker seamlessly flows through all areas of the job with his focus on trends. The Chemistry major, whose dress code is black for reasons he can’t’ put his hands on, described the operational module since he assumed the headship of the bank as fire brigade” because of the volatile shocks the economy is going through. But he enthused that the management is making good progress in positioning the bank where it should be. He said he is romantic and strives to blend with the society. He spoke to Ahamefula Ogbu and Obinna Chima on where the current banking trend is heading, disputing that bank frauds are on the increase in the era of online and mobile banking
Hmuch influence did your father have on you in your career choice?
I was born in the United Kingdom but I remember growing up in Nigeria. My father moved to Uganda during the time of Idi Amin and he worked for DFID. Interestingly, because my father is very light in complexion, when Idi Amin was chasing away foreigners, he considered my father as a foreigner too. So we left Uganda for Nigeria with nothing. I recall that he started his economic consulting firm called African Development Consulting Group and they were into feasibility studies.
I think for him, education has always been key. Two types of education: there is school education and education of life. So he made sure that we went to good schools like Lebanese Community Schools and it was cool. I remember I got scholarship and I went to Government College, Owerri. I spent a year there and then I went to Command Secondary School, Kaduna. I think the reason he moved us to the UK was that one day I asked him what a test tube is and he asked me, “Don’t you do practicals in class?” and I said no; that we saw it in a book. He was surprised. I think that was when he made the decision that my brother and I would go to school in the UK.
Was asking the question about test tube a pointer of what you were leaning towards or you were just plain curious?
No, I think we were talking about chemistry or we were talking about sciences. There was an article I was reading then when I asked the question, but coincidentally, I later worked in a place with plenty of test tubes. I did a Master in Chemistry – Chemical Research.
So what are you doing in banking?
Well, that is it. You see, after spending a year in the lab doing chemistry I was just working with eight wonderful people, you realised that this is not the kind of thing you wanted to do in life and you moved to something else and I really didn’t know what to do but my father then had just started Diamond Bank . So I finished in 1992 and Diamond Bank had started just a year before and he said why not try banking and I came back and Fola Adeola was his friend and he had started Guaranty Trust Bank too. I did my national service at Guaranty Trust Bank and I think it was one of the very good few organisations that was well managed. It was young, dynamic and they had values and values are very important. That was the point where I said okay, this is the kind of thing I wanted to do. Then I moved to Citizens Bank. That was where my Chemistry came into play because I started working for an oil and gas group and I was there for about four years. Then I left to do an MBA and I came back and my journey in Diamond Bank commenced in 1998 and I have been there ever since.
What core values from your father do you think have more shaped your attitude to life?
There are two people: my father and my mother who greatly influenced me. My mother has five boys and no girls. So she did make it a point of domesticating us. She insisted that just because she didn’t have girls did not mean we couldn’t help in the house. So even when we traveled on holidays, we helped her cook. So I know how to cook; I am very domesticated. Again, my father is a very simple person, very content and a religious person and he is a Catholic. I think the fundamental teaching of Catholicism is contentment and contentment means that regardless of the situation, you should find peace and make the most of it. There are people who were born with two hands and now they have one hand because of an accident or because of an injury, it is how you come out of it that matters. You must have inner peace to know you must get on with life; if you don’t have children, maybe that is God’s purpose to show that if you are content or you adopt, you are showing other people that if you don’t have it, you can still find peace and I believe God talks to us through action. When I bought my first car, my mother said you can’t afford this car. I asked how did she mean? I just bought it and you said no. She then said: “My definition of affording is if you crash this car today can you buy another one? I said no. Then she said ‘You can’t afford it.’ So affording means you like something you buy it and if anything happens to it you buy another one. That is her definition of affordability. You are just content with what you have. For me, my father is such a person with contentment. I remember when he was the chief executive of Diamond Bank and others were changing their cars every four years, he probably changed his cars every eight years because once he is attached to something, change is very difficult.
That is the kind of thing that I have imbibed from him. Be comfortable with who you are and be yourself and people will always like you for who you are.
Your father appears to be your role model; apart from your father who else would you say is or was your role model, living or dead?
I think one draws from different kinds of people. I think the one that always attracts me especially for the role I am playing in Diamond Bank is Alexander the Great and there are many aspects of it. This was a king or a leader from a very small country who conquered half of the world with a small army of people. To do that, he showed exemplary leadership.
You look and sound soft, it is easy to also think you are soft in decision making....
No. It is taking hard decisions and I cannot be soft always. As a leader, there are many hats that you wear and it depends on the situation. There is a situation where we have to do this, we have to do that and I can’t explain to you, that is directional leadership. There is nurturing one where if there is a decision you want to take, you get people to key into it. So it depends on the situation. You cannot use one style to manage all situations; that is bad leadership; you have to determine what is appropriate.
You have been the head of Diamond Bank for 15 months what are the things you have introduced in the bank?
One of the things that we have done is that we have made a commitment to the direction where the bank wants to go to. We have aligned the business and said we are going to retail and we are going to allocate. That is something we have done that we started about four years ago but we had not allocated or committed the resources to that decision. At the beginning of this year, what we did was to get the right people in the right places first. This is very, very key and also getting the culture into place because first of all you have to clean up your house; get the right people, get the right mindset as to what to do, aligning the business to where you want it to go. We have aligned the business and the team cohesion is better. People know exactly what we are doing and what we want to do. From a business perspective, we have introduced more. In terms of innovation, there is no solution in banking anywhere in the world that you can’t find in Nigeria. We have credit cards just as you have everywhere in the world. We have our mobile apps which is probably the best in the world just because the payment system in Nigeria is probably the best in the world that we have not harnessed. In terms of innovation especially in the financial inclusion space we have better proposition as we have actually taken banking into the market place and come up with solutions. We are working with Rumens World Banking and we are working with Bill Gates on financial inclusion using Mobile Yellow. When we look at mobile money in Safari com in Persa, the Diamond Yellow Solution is actually 10 times much better because with Diamond Yellow it is a full bank account and so it means by dialing *710# you can open an account with your MTN registered phone and you can receive or send money to anybody in Nigeria because you have a bank account. Again, why I said Nigeria has the best payment system in the world is that to transfer money to anybody in Nigeria, all you need to do is send the 10-digit account number and tell me your bank and I transfer the money to the person and he or she gets it immediately. In the UK it is not possible, you need your account number, sort code, swift number and you don’t get it immediately, you get it the next day. So, this is a country where you can open an account with your phone. It doesn’t have to be a smart phone. You can be in the village and someone can send money to you immediately. Not many places in the world can boast of this happening and this is an open system.
So in 15 months, what we have done is that we are digitalising the organisation; we are automating the processes and what we are seeing now is that some of the costs are rising but we are flattening that cost so that especially at a time like this we can leverage on the opportunities when the market starts growing. I took over at the beginning of the drop in the oil price so there are always opportunities and we have taken that time to really optimise our business model. I keep telling people that it is a good thing that oil price is the way it is right now because it is giving us an opportunity as a country to say how do we diversify the economy because it is not sustainable into the future as it is now. Even at our organisation, two things: the oil price and the TSA let public sector money go back to the centre. Let oil price remain the way it is for a while because this thing happened in 2008 but the problem was that six months later, it went back to $100 and we forgot to diversify. But now this is very deep and prolonged stay of slide in oil price and that is why there is a debate about how do we diversify the economy. So for us in Diamond Bank, we know that we cannot change it by ourselves and now everybody is saying there is no more much money in corporate and commercial business space because we have been a trade dependent economy. It is now looking at how do we manufacture? How do we improve our trade? How do we improve medical care in Nigeria and it means we have to start investing in those things.
You are superintending what looks like a family business, how far are you willing to go to ensure that this legacy is sustained?
I think it has gone beyond that since we went public. Don’t forget that I am the fourth managing director. There were two before me. I don’t think I was made Chief Executive Officer because my father was Managing Director. I was made Managing Director because I was the right person for the job in terms of where the bank wants to go, the expertise that was required and then you have to look at the board that we have. It made up of international investors as well. So I went through a selection process. So it was a matter who knew the organisation and is equipped to do the job. I don’t know who the next Managing Director is going to be but even from a shareholder’s perspective, you want the right person for the job because even as a shareholder, you want somebody that can give you return on your investment. If you tell me that we have to put a family member there and he is not going to give the best result, I am not interested at all.
So you relate with the bank barely on professional level and there is no family sentiment that you take to the office?
Don’t forget, Dozie family is a shareholder in Diamond Bank and there are other key stakeholders and if there is no alignment, there must be alignment with shareholders with management. The board represents the shareholders but the board must take the right decision that would be good for Diamond Bank irrespective of the shareholders because shareholders have different views about returns.
Tell us how much impact the TSA has on movement of public funds from Diamond Bank?
Fortunately, we had started moving out of public sector so the only impact TSA will have is on your liquidity. When we paid back TSA our liquidity still had sufficient buffer from the minimum requirement. The impact was on profitability for everyone. It was not even the removal of TSA that had impact on us but when they moved CRR from 85 to 30 per cent and when they converged it they moved private sector up and moved the public sector down so we lost because 85 to 90 per cent of our deposit base was from the private sector so the cost of our fund went up because we saw that our business was not sustainable with a high level of government participation.
Another issue about uncertainty is the value of the naira. There is a strong debate on whether to devalue or not to devalue. Where do you stand on that?
There are many schools of thoughts. I look at it from the standpoint of what do we gain from devaluation? We get more inflow from the dollar; if you get more inflow of the dollar, are they coming to actually help in driving the economy or is it portfolio investors coming to invest in cheaper stocks and then leave when they have gotten their profits? Those are the questions. Are there other ways of achieving the same thing? I am actually in the middle. I don’t have opinion about it but I think there are more to it. And what is devaluation? Devaluation is devaluing the price that Central Bank sells money to customers that require essential goods at the inter-bank and there is the parallel market. Now for me I think that if the right people sit at the table, there is a way. The most important thing is for people to sit at the table and agree that the naira must find its value in the market. The thing is, as I always say: there is scarcity which is driving up price and there is demand and some of these demands I think were a bit excessive. People just wake up and say I want to go and watch Manchester United playing and they fly off out that when they do that they use forex. So the correct thing is that if you devalue who suffers? It is actually the affluent who send their children abroad, those seeking medical attention abroad and you don’t blame them too because there are some ailments that are life-threatening that cannot be treated here. So if you can afford it and you can pay for it abroad, you should go but the thing is should you use government’s scarce resources to do it or should you go to the market to find it? In that case do you devalue if people make a choice? If you want to stimulate this economy and you also want to ensure that those manufacturing concerns are sustainable into the future then you must give them subsidy, it happens everywhere in the world and everybody. You cannot please everybody. Now, If I was a businessman or an educationist, I will say there is an opportunity here. Why are people sending their children abroad. Don’t forget in the ‘70s and ‘80s, people used to come from parts of Africa to our universities in Nigeria. What do we need to recreate that? That is the opportunity because we are talking about import subsidies but services is one whereby we can become a hub. As you know Nigerians are very intelligent, we have a very young economy. I know a lot of doctors who have come back to Nigeria and are doing a thriving business but what is stopping them is the capacity to grow, to expand; so that is where the opportunity is.
The CBN did say from January, COT will no longer be charged and introduced maintenance fee, has your bank commenced implementing that directive?
Let me speak for the banking community before I come to Diamond Bank. Banks are no longer charging COT; they have stopped but there is something else now called Account Maintenance Fee which is up to one premium as it was before.
Is that not COT in another guise...?.
It is not COT; it is premium on turnover. They are completely different things. But if you look at Diamond Bank business model, the only people that are faced with account maintainable fee are people like commercial or corporate clients. We phased out COT long ago. Diamond Exclusive and some accounts pay flat rate every month. Student’s accounts don’t pay COT, small businesses don’t pay COT, we stopped COT about five years ago, and they pay a fixed charge. What we did was to say that this COT is not sustainable. If you look at UK, they were charging COT and they stopped. Although in Nigeria there is an argument that since we have not implemented cash, the cost of handling cash is high but there are some organisations that don’t handle cash too they still pay but they subsidise some people. But for us what we did five years ago is to say they were not sustainable so for savings you don’t pay any fees but for current accounts you must pay maintenance fee. We said for small businesses we have to charge you. We have three categories of small businesses. Diamond Business Starter, Growing and Established and it depends on your turnover. You don’t pay COT, you pay fixed charges and I think it is N2,000; N4000 and N5000 or thereabout per month. The first thing is that you have to find out how much it will take you to run an account, that is what it gives you so that if you are an individual and you want to run an account you pay N60,000 per annum that what you pay, for a small business that pays N5,000 monthly you know you pay N60,000 per annum for access to finance , access to market and access to advisory service so from that fee that you pay we create solutions to those things.
How many branches do you have?
About 270 branches all over the country and with those beyond Nigeria it takes it up to 370 or so. We are in five countries: Republic of Benin, Togo, Cote d’Ivore, Senegal and we have a limited licence in the UK. It has been operational in the last three years.
So if one has money here can I withdraw it in the UK?
No, the person can’t. The UK licence allows us for establishing letter of credit for our customers’ it is not a retail licence.
What is your growth strategy? Are you not interested in buying Keystone Bank?
When you buy or you merge something it is either because of the people, staff, customer base or the branch network, so if you look at those three criteria from our perspective, why should I be interested in Keystone Bank?
Is getting bigger not on the card?
For us size is not a key parameter of our success, it is the number of active customer base that we want. That is why we are going to the inclusion space where nobody wants to go to because we believe that the value of any organisation is the number of customers that you have in your ecosystem and so size doesn’t do anything for you because you can have a big house with nobody inside it or you can have a small house with plenty of people inside there doing a lot of things. That is what matters. Don’t forget that from a stakeholder’s perspective, return on investment, return on capital and return on people are very key and in Nigeria we talk of size, we have used size as parameter as indicator for success. What is the amount of money in your wallet, what is your quality of life? Those are what matter. What is the sustainability of your business? What is the impact of your business to society? Those are what is important to be measured and should be the new paradigm.
If you were to advise the federal and states governments on the importance of planning in other to attract investors what would you tell them?
I think they should imitate Lagos State which has a master plan that has been going on for over 12 years now across three governments. You must have a master plan and it goes back to that statement I made about having a vision, a realistic vision you know is going to work out of what you want the state to be like. It starts from, these are the things that need to be put in place and this is the way we want to go about it and this is the climate we are going to do it which I think Buhari is trying to do with proper governance and minimum corruption. It is corruption in the end that scuttles everything because corruption is people looking at things from the perspective of what is there for me regardless of the greater good. I don’t have any information, I look at it from the point of how I run my business; I know exactly where I want us to go, I know what is required to get there but I also know the kind of attitude of the people and the commitment that is required and you must put those things in place for you to get there and give people hope and have milestones to reaching your goal because those milestones tell you we are getting there, we are making progress. Again, you must be accountable. In America, they have the state of the union where the president goes to tell the people what he has done, this is what I said I am going to do, this is what I have done or this is the reason I didn’t do that; even if you say the opposition have issues but let us know people can talk about it. In Nigeria we don’t; when are we going to have the budget, when are we going to implement it? Nobody knows, uncertainty, when everything is shrouded in uncertainty it is difficult to plan, then there is planning and there is execution of the plan.
What is your most interesting moment since becoming Managing Director of Diamond Bank?
I think my most interesting moment was this year when we actually announced our new structure. It is interesting to me because I started the retail journey in Diamond Bank in 2008 when we decided to do retail and in the first week of January I made an announcement that what we started as part of our business some years back was now going to be our core business. So we were very excited and it will bring a lot of change in this era of change. You know our dress code was dark suit, white or blue shirt and now we are graduating to business casuals as long as you blend in. If you ask me, we are trying to blend into our society so people don’t see you as a banker but rather, as partners. So for me I know that Uzoma Dozie is not a banker , he is just a man that has worked in the banking industry for over 20 years and I think that is the type of mindset you should have in this type of job so you will not pigeonhole yourself,. So I see it this way; we have created a platform where banking is one of the services we provide, the other is how do we create value for our over five million customers by partnering with others in the ecosystem of Nigeria and beyond. Our vision statement when we started was ‘to provide creative solutions to our customers and in key financial industry areas in the world. But when we look at technology and the way the world has evolved, we changed it ‘To be able to provide services to our customers regardless of where they are in the world’. So physical space no longer matters or limits us.
There are many schools of thoughts. I look at it from the standpoint of what do we gain from devaluation? We get more inflow from the dollar; if you get more inflow of the dollar, are they coming to actually help in driving the economy or is it portfolio investors coming to invest in cheaper stocks and then leave when they have gotten their profits? Those are the questions. Are there other ways of achieving the same thing? I am actually in the middle. I don’t have opinion about it but I think there are more to it. And what is devaluation? Devaluation is devaluing the price that Central Bank sells money to customers that require essential goods at the inter-bank and there is the parallel market. Now for me I think that if the right people sit at the table, there is a way. The most important thing is for people to sit at the table and agree that the naira must find its value in the market. The thing is, as I always say: there is scarcity which is driving up price and there is demand and some of these demands I think were a bit excessive. People just wake up and say I want to go and watch Manchester United playing and they fly off out that when they do that they use forex. So the correct thing is that if you devalue who suffers? It is actually the affluent who send their children abroad, those seeking medical attention abroad and you don’t blame them too because there are some ailments that are life-threatening that cannot be treated here. So if you can afford it and you can pay for it abroad, you should go but the thing is should you use government’s scarce resources to do it or should you go to the market to find it? In that case do you devalue if people make a choice? If you want to stimulate this economy and you also want to ensure that those manufacturing concerns are sustainable into the future then you must give them subsidy, it happens everywhere in the world and everybody. You cannot please everybody. Now, If I was a businessman or an educationist, I will say there is an opportunity here. Why are people sending their children abroad. Don’t forget in the ‘70s and ‘80s, people used to come from parts of Africa to our universities in Nigeria. What do we need to recreate that? That is the opportunity because we are talking about import subsidies but services is one whereby we can become a hub. As you know Nigerians are very intelligent, we have a very young economy. I know a lot of doctors who have come back to Nigeria and are doing a thriving business but what is stopping them is the capacity to grow, to expand; so that is where the opportunity is.
The CBN did say from January, COT will no longer be charged and introduced maintenance fee, has your bank commenced implementing that directive?
Let me speak for the banking community before I come to Diamond Bank. Banks are no longer charging COT; they have stopped but there is something else now called Account Maintenance Fee which is up to one premium as it was before.
Is that not COT in another guise...?.
It is not COT; it is premium on turnover. They are completely different things. But if you look at Diamond Bank business model, the only people that are faced with account maintainable fee are people like commercial or corporate clients. We phased out COT long ago. Diamond Exclusive and some accounts pay flat rate every month. Student’s accounts don’t pay COT, small businesses don’t pay COT, we stopped COT about five years ago, and they pay a fixed charge. What we did was to say that this COT is not sustainable. If you look at UK, they were charging COT and they stopped. Although in Nigeria there is an argument that since we have not implemented cash, the cost of handling cash is high but there are some organisations that don’t handle cash too they still pay but they subsidise some people. But for us what we did five years ago is to say they were not sustainable so for savings you don’t pay any fees but for current accounts you must pay maintenance fee. We said for small businesses we have to charge you. We have three categories of small businesses. Diamond Business Starter, Growing and Established and it depends on your turnover. You don’t pay COT, you pay fixed charges and I think it is N2,000; N4000 and N5000 or thereabout per month. The first thing is that you have to find out how much it will take you to run an account, that is what it gives you so that if you are an individual and you want to run an account you pay N60,000 per annum that what you pay, for a small business that pays N5,000 monthly you know you pay N60,000 per annum for access to finance , access to market and access to advisory service so from that fee that you pay we create solutions to those things.
How many branches do you have?
About 270 branches all over the country and with those beyond Nigeria it takes it up to 370 or so. We are in five countries: Republic of Benin, Togo, Cote d’Ivore, Senegal and we have a limited licence in the UK. It has been operational in the last three years.
So if one has money here can I withdraw it in the UK?
No, the person can’t. The UK licence allows us for establishing letter of credit for our customers’ it is not a retail licence.
What is your growth strategy? Are you not interested in buying Keystone Bank?
When you buy or you merge something it is either because of the people, staff, customer base or the branch network, so if you look at those three criteria from our perspective, why should I be interested in Keystone Bank?
Is getting bigger not on the card?
For us size is not a key parameter of our success, it is the number of active customer base that we want. That is why we are going to the inclusion space where nobody wants to go to because we believe that the value of any organisation is the number of customers that you have in your ecosystem and so size doesn’t do anything for you because you can have a big house with nobody inside it or you can have a small house with plenty of people inside there doing a lot of things. That is what matters. Don’t forget that from a stakeholder’s perspective, return on investment, return on capital and return on people are very key and in Nigeria we talk of size, we have used size as parameter as indicator for success. What is the amount of money in your wallet, what is your quality of life? Those are what matter. What is the sustainability of your business? What is the impact of your business to society? Those are what is important to be measured and should be the new paradigm.
If you were to advise the federal and states governments on the importance of planning in other to attract investors what would you tell them?
I think they should imitate Lagos State which has a master plan that has been going on for over 12 years now across three governments. You must have a master plan and it goes back to that statement I made about having a vision, a realistic vision you know is going to work out of what you want the state to be like. It starts from, these are the things that need to be put in place and this is the way we want to go about it and this is the climate we are going to do it which I think Buhari is trying to do with proper governance and minimum corruption. It is corruption in the end that scuttles everything because corruption is people looking at things from the perspective of what is there for me regardless of the greater good. I don’t have any information, I look at it from the point of how I run my business; I know exactly where I want us to go, I know what is required to get there but I also know the kind of attitude of the people and the commitment that is required and you must put those things in place for you to get there and give people hope and have milestones to reaching your goal because those milestones tell you we are getting there, we are making progress. Again, you must be accountable. In America, they have the state of the union where the president goes to tell the people what he has done, this is what I said I am going to do, this is what I have done or this is the reason I didn’t do that; even if you say the opposition have issues but let us know people can talk about it. In Nigeria we don’t; when are we going to have the budget, when are we going to implement it? Nobody knows, uncertainty, when everything is shrouded in uncertainty it is difficult to plan, then there is planning and there is execution of the plan.
What is your most interesting moment since becoming Managing Director of Diamond Bank?
I think my most interesting moment was this year when we actually announced our new structure. It is interesting to me because I started the retail journey in Diamond Bank in 2008 when we decided to do retail and in the first week of January I made an announcement that what we started as part of our business some years back was now going to be our core business. So we were very excited and it will bring a lot of change in this era of change. You know our dress code was dark suit, white or blue shirt and now we are graduating to business casuals as long as you blend in. If you ask me, we are trying to blend into our society so people don’t see you as a banker but rather, as partners. So for me I know that Uzoma Dozie is not a banker , he is just a man that has worked in the banking industry for over 20 years and I think that is the type of mindset you should have in this type of job so you will not pigeonhole yourself,. So I see it this way; we have created a platform where banking is one of the services we provide, the other is how do we create value for our over five million customers by partnering with others in the ecosystem of Nigeria and beyond. Our vision statement when we started was ‘to provide creative solutions to our customers and in key financial industry areas in the world. But when we look at technology and the way the world has evolved, we changed it ‘To be able to provide services to our customers regardless of where they are in the world’. So physical space no longer matters or limits us.
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