Ecobank Transnational Incorporated delivered one of its strongest performances in years in 2025, posting $801 million in pre-tax profit, up 21% from a year earlier, alongside net revenue of $2.45 billion, a 17% increase.

The results mark a high point since Jeremy Awori, CEO took over in 2022 and offer early validation of the group’s long-criticized Growth, Transformation and Returns strategy.

The improvement is especially clear in operating efficiency.

The cost-to-income ratio dropped to 48.3%, from 52.8% a year earlier and above 70% in the group’s more difficult years before 2018. For a bank operating across more than 33 markets with uneven macroeconomic conditions, the shift is significant: Ecobank now spends less than 49 cents to generate one dollar of revenue.

It also marks a structural change, with revenue growth now outpacing expenses at the group level.

Performance was led by the Corporate and Investment Banking division, which posted $697 million in pre-tax profit, up 40%, driven by trade finance, cash management, and capital markets activity.

The Consumer and Commercial Banking segment followed with $480 million, up 27%, supported by stronger deposit mobilization and a 33% increase in lending.

Customer deposits rose by $4.9 billion to reach $25.3 billion, while total loans stood at $12.8 billion.

Return on tangible equity reached 27.8%, signaling a renewed capacity to generate value.

The board’s recommendation to pay $40 million in dividends, or $0.0016 per share, carries more symbolic weight than financial impact.

Over the nine years leading up to 2022, Ecobank paid dividends only twice, the last time in 2016.

From 2017 to 2021, shareholders saw no payouts as the group focused on repairing its balance sheet, transitioning to Basel III standards, and navigating the pandemic.

Ola Olukoyede, executive chairman, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), has cautioned Nigerian banks against granting loans without credible collateral, warning that such practices often lead to insider abuse and non-performing loans.

Olukoyede issued the warning recently when he received Mufutau Olawale Abiola, chief audit executive, First Bank Plc, who led a delegation on a courtesy visit to the Lagos Zonal Directorate 2 of the Commission in Ikoyi.

Speaking through  Bawa Usman Kaltungo, acting zonal director, Lagos Zonal Directorate 2, Ikoyi,  Olukoyede expressed grave concerns over how banks in the country grant loans, noting that loans backed only by personal guarantees, including those of top executives, are inadequate and put depositors’ funds at risk.

He said: “We have issues with banks’ mode of giving loans. The process often shows insider abuse.”

While emphasizing that banks should desist from issuing loans without visible or credible collateral, he added that “Top-down loans are not secured. You cannot give a loan based solely on the personal guarantee of the Chief Executive.

This is not security. Banks must not issue loans without verifiable collateral. If there is proper collateral for loans obtained by bank customers, this will reduce the rate of non-performing loans.”

He further warned that a bank is only a custodian, and that giving loans without adequate collateral “amounts to tampering with depositors’ funds.”

He also urged banks to implement measures, including thorough due diligence on its customers, to prevent loan defaults.

According to him, “Even in situations where you outsource due diligence, there must be a clause of liability,” he said.

Reaffirming the Commission’s commitment to continued cooperation with the bank in tackling financial crimes, he urged the bank to release its staff promptly when invited during investigations of alleged financial crimes.

“When we invite your staff, especially where insider connivance is suspected, you must release them so we can jointly fight economic and financial crimes. We must work together to stay ahead of criminals. Let me add that where money is, that is where people’s hearts are. Most of the time, we escalate issues to foreign security agencies as may be necessary,” he added.

Earlier, Abiola expressed gratitude to the EFCC leadership for the engagement, noting that the visit was intended to strengthen the existing collaboration between the bank and the Commission.

While urging the EFCC to expedite investigations into cases involving its staff and others, Abiola also disclosed that a designated team in his bank handles requests from the EFCC.

More than one million online banking accounts were compromised by infostealers last year, as financial cyberthreats shifted toward credential theft and data reuse.

Pic credit…cybelangel.com

Attackers are moving away from traditional PC banking malware and increasingly relying on social engineering and dark web marketplaces, while mobile financial malware continues to grow.

Detailed information on current financial cyberthreat trends is available in Kaspersky’s new report.

These digital “pickpockets” often exfiltrate data and remove themselves within seconds, making them difficult to detect.

They are a primary source of initial access for ransomware and identity theft

Traditional financial phishing has not gone away. Pages that mimicked e-shops dominated the financial phishing landscape (48.5% in 2025, up 10.3% from 2024), followed by banks (26.1% in 2025, down by 16.5% from 2024) and payment systems (25.5% in 2025, up by 6.2% from 2024). The decline in bank phishing may suggest that these services are becoming increasingly difficult to successfully impersonate, and fraudsters are turning to easier ways to access users’ finances.

Attackers are adapting campaigns to regional digital habits. In the Middle East, financial phishing is overwhelmingly concentrated on e-commerce (85.8%), indicating a heavy reliance on online retail lures, whereas in Africa bank-related phishing leads (53.75%), which may indicate that user account security there is still insufficient. Latin America shows a more balanced distribution but with a higher share of e-commerce and bank targeting, while APAC and Europe display a more even spread across all three categories, pointing to diversified attack strategies.

In 2025, the decline in users affected by financial PC malware continued as users increasingly rely on mobile devices to manage their finances. Contrary to PC banking malware, mobile banker attacks grew by 1.5 times in 2025 compared to the previous year.

Complementing traditional financial malware, infostealers played a significant role in enabling financial crime both on PCs and mobile devices by harvesting login credentials, cookies, bank card numbers, crypto wallet seed phrases, and autofill data from browsers and applications, which attackers then used for account takeovers or direct banking fraud. Kaspersky data pointed to a surge in infostealer detections (up by 59% globally, 53% in Africa and 26% in the Middle East, on PCs from 2024 to 2025), fueling credential-based attacks.

According to Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence (DFI), in 2025 over one million online banking accounts served by the world’s 100 largest banks fell victim to infostealers: credentials for these accounts were being freely shared on the dark web. The countries with the highest median number of compromised accounts per bank were India, Spain, and Brazil.

74% of payment cards that were compromised by infostealer malware, published on dark web resources and identified by Kaspersky DFI team in 2025, remained valid as of March 2026. This means that attackers could still use cards that had been stolen months or even years prior.

“The dark web has become a central hub for financial cybercrime. Stolen credentials and bank cards that have been harvested by infostealers are aggregated, repackaged, and sold there, while phishing kits targeted at users of financial products are offered as ready-to-use services.

This creates a self-sustaining ecosystem where data theft and fraud operations reinforce each other, making attacks scalable and easy to carry out by fraudsters with minimal experience. Breaking this cycle requires proactive threat intelligence on the part of organisations, and increased awareness and scrutiny from individual users,” comments Polina Tretyak, Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence analyst.