Fidelity Bank Plc held the Kano edition of its Quarterly Business Forum, bringing together entrepreneurs, business owners, industry stakeholders, and customers in northern Nigeria for structured discussions on business growth, financial management, and the specific opportunities and challenges facing SMEs in the region.
The forum, themed “Positioning Northern Businesses for Growth,” is part of Fidelity Bank’s ongoing engagement strategy, a deliberate move to take its SME banking beyond conventional product delivery and into direct conversation with the entrepreneurs it seeks to serve.
Read also: SMEDAN partners Fidelity Bank to empower 40m MSMEs
What northern businesses are dealing with
Executive Director, North, at Fidelity Bank, Sufiyanu Garba, was clear about the bank’s position: Kano and the wider North have the talent, enterprise, and resources to play a leading role in Nigeria’s economic future, and the bank is committed to supporting that growth. He framed the bank’s ambition around being a trusted partner that provides financing, knowledge, connections, and solutions, rather than simply a provider of funds.
That framing matters in a northern business context where the challenges facing SMEs are compounded by insecurity in some areas, limited infrastructure relative to the south, and fewer institutional support networks. The Kano forum gave northern entrepreneurs direct access to banking professionals, business advisers, and peer networks in a structured environment, the kind of access that SMEs in Lagos can take for granted but that remains less available in secondary commercial cities.
Divisional Head of SME Banking at Fidelity Bank, Ugochi Osinigwe, described the forum as a listening platform, a vehicle for understanding the realities confronting businesses in different parts of the country and using that understanding to design products and services that are genuinely responsive to what entrepreneurs need, not what a Lagos-based product team assumes they need.
A bank that holds quarterly forums in Kano, Aba, and Onitsha is doing something meaningfully different from one that invites northern and eastern entrepreneurs to Lagos events. The value of proximity, to customers, to their problems, and to the solutions that work in their specific commercial environments, is underrated in Nigerian banking.
Read also: Fidelity Bank to introduce SME hub with creative studios
The broader context
Fidelity Bank has consistently ranked among the top institutions for SME lending in Nigeria, with Nairametrics data confirming it as one of the three banks, alongside FBN Holdings and GTCO, recording the most SME growth support in Africa’s largest economy. The Kano forum adds a direct engagement dimension to that lending commitment, building relationships between the bank and northern entrepreneurs that extend beyond transactional banking.
The forum’s timing, as preparations for the Dangote Refinery IPO dominate financial sector conversations, is also notable. For SME owners in Kano who have heard about the N525 Dangote shares but are uncertain how to participate, forums that bring bank officials and financial knowledge directly to the region play a practical financial inclusion role that goes beyond SME credit.
