Oluwatoyin Sanni

Oluwatoyin Sanni: Nigeria's Case to the World's Capital

In 2017 the Pearl Awards, the Nigerian capital market's own honours, named a Chief Executive of the Year for the twenty-second time. For the first time in that history, the winner was a woman. Oluwatoyin Sanni had by then spent four years running United Capital Plc, closing bond issues denominated in trillions of naira, and she was about to walk away from all of it to start a firm of her own. Her argument, made in a book that carries her thesis in its title, is simple and unfashionable: investment flows are to a modern economy what blood is to the body, and Nigeria is not getting enough of them because the world has been told the wrong story.

Called to the Bar at Eighteen

Sanni was born in 1965, one of seven children; her father was an accountant, her mother a businesswoman. She was educated at Queen's School, Ibadan, and took a law degree from the University of Ife — now Obafemi Awolowo University — in 1984, at eighteen. That detail is not decoration. Finishing a law degree at the age at which most students are starting one indicates a specific kind of early capacity, and it set the pattern of a career in which she was repeatedly the youngest or the first.

She went on to the Nigerian Law School in Lagos for her BL, and took a master's degree at the University of Lagos. Later she added executive programmes at Harvard Business School, Lagos Business School, the Pan-Atlantic University CEO Program and the IESE Chief Executive Program. She qualified not only as a lawyer but as an investment banker, a chartered secretary and a stockbroker — an unusually broad set of professional licences for one person, and the reason she can operate across the legal, structuring and distribution ends of a transaction at once.

Trustees, Custody, Capital

Her early executive career ran through the plumbing of Nigerian finance rather than its glamorous end. She spent eight years as chief executive of Cornerstone Trustees. In 2007 she established UBA Global Investor Services, the custody arm of the UBA Group, which went on to become a leading Nigerian custodian. Custody is unglamorous work — the safekeeping and settlement of other people's securities — but it is precisely the infrastructure a market needs before serious foreign money will enter it, and building one was a statement about what she thought Nigeria was missing.

From there she became Managing Director and CEO of United Capital Trustees, and then Group Chief Executive Officer of United Capital Plc.

Trillions in Naira

Her four years at the top of United Capital are the core of the record. She led the firm through landmark transactions: the multi-trillion-naira AMCON bond issues, which recapitalised Nigeria's banking system after its bad-debt crisis; the Lagos State Bond Programme; and debt issues for Lafarge WAPCO, UPDC and Flour Mills. These are the deals through which a country builds a functioning domestic bond market — sub-sovereign and corporate paper that gives institutions something to buy other than government treasury bills.

The firm performed accordingly. Under her leadership United Capital took the Best Overall Company award on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, along with recognition for best corporate governance and highest dividend yield, and she appeared on BusinessDay's Top 25 CEOs on the NSE in 2014, 2015 and 2016. In 2017 came the CNBC Africa AABLA awards as All African Business Woman of the Year for West Africa and then for Africa as a whole, and the Pearl Awards CEO of the Year. She resigned in June 2018 at the peak of that recognition.

Emerging Africa

In July 2018, one month later, she became chief executive of Emerging Africa Capital Group, a firm built to connect African investors and issuers with capital and to make the case for African assets to international money. She sits on the boards of EAC Advisory, EAC Trustees and Emerging Africa Asset Management, and BusinessDay describes her as devoted to facilitating investment into Africa and presenting Nigeria in a positive light — work made harder, the paper notes, by insecurity and fraud cases that deter foreign investors.

The institution-building runs alongside. She founded and chairs Women in Finance Nigeria, established in 2016. She has served as president of the Association of Corporate and Individual Investment Advisers, past president of the Association of Investment Advisers and Portfolio Managers, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Financial Literacy Technical Committee, a council member of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators Nigeria, and a board member of Transcorp Plc, the Pearl Awards and NEPAD Business Group Nigeria. She is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Stockbrokers.

She writes as well. *Riding the Eagle: A Guide to Investing in Nigeria* is her attempt to give foreign and local investors a usable map of the market; BusinessDay reports it has sold in very large numbers. *Yes, You Too Can Maximize Your Life* and *Get to the Top* are aimed at women coming up behind her. She speaks regularly at Howard University, Imperial College, the Global Custody Forum and WIPO's African ministerial conferences.

Why Oluwatoyin Is Called a Genius

The honest description is not intellectual brilliance but an unusual synthetic range, applied to a market that badly needed someone with it. Nigerian capital markets have historically failed to attract long-term money for reasons that are simultaneously legal, structural, informational and reputational — the instruments are unfamiliar, the custody and trustee infrastructure is thin, and the country's story reaches investors mostly through headlines about fraud and insecurity. Sanni is one of very few people qualified across all of those layers at once: a lawyer, a chartered secretary, a stockbroker and an investment banker who has personally built a custodian, run a trustee company, and structured sub-sovereign and corporate bond issues at multi-trillion-naira scale. Holding the whole problem in one head is what let her work on all of it — and then, having done the technical work, go and write the book explaining the market to outsiders, because she had concluded the information gap was as binding a constraint as the structural one.

The counter-case should be stated. Sanni is an executive and an advocate, not an innovator; she did not invent an instrument, a technique or a theory. Her awards are industry awards, given by the market she operates in, and the "first woman" distinctions record how closed that market was rather than how exceptional she is. Nigeria's investment inflows remain constrained by factors far outside any one chief executive's reach. What is genuinely rare, and defensible, is the breadth: most finance careers narrow, and hers widened, deliberately, until she could work the legal, operational, commercial and narrative sides of the same problem.

Legacy

Sanni married at twenty-five and has three children; her Christian faith is a stated foundation of how she works. Her institutional legacy is already visible in the market's furniture — a custodian she founded, a trustee business she ran, a bond programme framework other issuers now follow, a professional association for women in Nigerian finance where there was none before 2016. The larger project is unfinished by design. She is still arguing, in boardrooms and in print, that Africa's problem is not a shortage of investable opportunity but a shortage of people willing to explain it properly.

Achievements

• Educated at Obafemi Awolowo University and University of Lagos