Fidelity Bank Plc said it has raised the required minimum share capital for lenders with international authorisation, boosting its capital base as Nigerian lenders race to comply with tougher regulatory requirements scheduled to end by March 2026.

Nneka Onyeali-Ikpe, GMD, Fidelity Bank

The push-up in its eligible capital, raised through a private placement, effectively placed Fidelity Bank among lenders that have successfully scaled through the regulatory mandate.

The Lagos-based bank, in a disclosure on the Nigerian Exchange on Tuesday, said the offer, which opened and closed on December 31, 2025, was approved by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Proceeds from the transaction lift Fidelity’s eligible capital to about N564.5 billion from N305.5 billion, subject to final regulatory approvals.

The private placement was carried out under a mandate granted by shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting on February 6, 2025, authorising the bank to issue up to 20 billion ordinary shares.

Fidelity did not disclose the pricing or investor mix for the transaction.

The fundraising caps an aggressive capital-raising drive by Fidelity over the past two years. In 2024, the lender raised N175.85 billion through a public offer and rights issue, which brought its eligible capital to N305.5 billion. That left a shortfall of about N194.5 billion relative to the new minimum capital threshold.

Nigeria’s central bank in 2024 announced a sweeping recapitalisation programme aimed at strengthening the banking system, raising the minimum capital for commercial banks with international authorisation to N500 billion.

The apex bank mandated an increment in capital for national banks, pushing it to N200 billion and N50 billion for regional banks. The 24‑month compliance window ends on March 31, 2026, a regulation that’s triggering a wave of equity issuances, merger talks, and balance-sheet restructuring across the sector.

Fidelity’s latest capital raise places it above the regulatory floor, potentially easing pressure on the bank as peers continue to tap markets. The additional capital is also expected to support balance-sheet expansion, larger ticket lending, and resilience against macroeconomic shocks in Africa’s fourth-largest economy, which has been grappling with currency volatility, double-digit inflation, and elevated interest rates.

Analysts stated the scale and speed of this transaction validate Fidelity Bank’s standing among tier‑one lenders. Recently, Fitch Ratings affirmed the bank’s Long‑Term Issuer Default Rating at ‘B’ and upgraded its National Long‑Term Rating to ‘A+(nga)’, citing stronger capital buffers and improved profitability.

Fitch also recognised the bank’s expanding franchise, sound fundamentals, and healthy foreign‑currency liquidity, noting it was Nigeria’s sixth‑largest lender by assets at the end of 2024.

PalmPay has opened a new office at 33 Old Yaba Road, Lagos, reinforcing its commitment to innovation, customer service, and operational growth in Nigeria.

The new office represents a continued investment in PalmPay’s people, operations, and infrastructure, supporting the company’s ability to deliver reliable financial services at scale. Designed to accommodate PalmPay’s growing team, the workspace enables closer cross-functional collaboration while strengthening service delivery nationwide. Located in Yaba, one of Lagos’s most established commercial and technology corridors, the office further anchors PalmPay within Nigeria’s innovation and financial ecosystem.

Speaking at the office launch, Managing Director Chika Nwosu highlighted that the new workspace reflects PalmPay’s long-term vision and dedication to excellence. “This new office represents an important step in our growth journey and our commitment to building secure, reliable, and inclusive financial solutions for our users,” he said.

The launch event was attended by PalmPay’s leadership team, employees and customers, who toured the facility and marked the company’s continued growth and progress.

With the opening of its office at 33 Old Yaba Road, PalmPay continues to strengthen its presence in Nigeria and reaffirm its mission to drive financial inclusion through innovative digital solutions.

PalmPay is a leading digital banking platform driving financial inclusion and economic empowerment in underserved emerging markets. Through its secure, user-friendly, and inclusive suite of financial services, PalmPay empowers individuals and businesses with tools to manage and grow their money.

PalmPay offers a comprehensive range of products, including mobile payments, savings, and micro-insurance via its app and mobile money agent network.

Since launching in Nigeria in 2019 under a Mobile Money Operator license, the platform has grown to over 35 million app users and processes up to 15 million transactions daily. PalmPay has operations in Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Bangladesh.

Kaspersky experts outline how the rapid development of AI is reshaping the cybersecurity landscape in 2026, both for individual users and for businesses. Large language models (LLMs) are influencing defensive capabilities while simultaneously expanding opportunities for threat actors.

Deepfakes are becoming a mainstream technology, and awareness will continue to grow. Companies are increasingly discussing the risks of synthetic content and training employees to reduce the likelihood of falling victim to it. As the volume of deepfakes grows, so does the range of formats in which they appear.

At the same time, awareness is rising not only within organisations but also among regular users: end consumers encounter fake content more often and better understand the nature of such threats. As a result, deepfakes are becoming a stable element of the security agenda, requiring a systematic approach to training and internal policies.

Deepfake quality will improve through better audio and a lowering barrier to entry. The visual quality of deepfakes is already high, while realistic audio remains the main area for future growth.

At the same time, content generation tools are becoming easier to use: even non-experts can now create a mid-quality deepfake in just a few clicks. As a result, the average quality continues to rise, creation becomes accessible to a far broader audience, and these capabilities will inevitably continue to be leveraged by cybercriminals.

Online deepfakes will continue to evolve but remain tools for advanced users. Real-time face and voice swapping technologies are improving, but their setup still requires more advanced technical skills. Wide adoption is unlikely, yet the risks in targeted scenarios will grow: increasing realism and the ability to manipulate video through virtual cameras make such attacks more convincing.

Efforts to develop a reliable system for labelling AI-generated content will continue. There are still no unified criteria for reliably identifying synthetic content, and current labels are easy to bypass or remove, especially when working with open-source models. For this reason, new technical and regulatory initiatives aimed at addressing the problem are likely to emerge.

Open-weight models will approach top closed models in many cybersecurity-related tasks, which create more opportunities for misuse. Closed models still offer stricter control mechanisms and safeguards, limiting abuse.

However, open-source systems are rapidly catching up in functionality and circulate without comparable restrictions. This blurs the difference between proprietary models and open-source models both of which can be used efficiently for undesired or malicious purposes.

The line between legitimate and fraudulent AI-generated content will become increasingly blurred. AI can already produce well-crafted scam emails, convincing visual identities, and high-quality phishing pages.

At the same time, major brands are adopting synthetic materials in advertising, making AI-generated content look familiar and visually “normal.” As a result, distinguishing real from fake will become even more challenging, both for users and for automated detection systems.

AI will become a cross-chain tool in cyberattacks and be used across most stages of the kill chain. Threat actors already employ LLMs to write code, build infrastructure, and automate operational tasks.

Further advances will reinforce this trend: AI will increasingly support multiple stages of an attack, from preparation and communication to assembling malicious components, probing for vulnerabilities and deploying tools. Attackers will also work to hide signs of AI involvement, making such operations harder to analyse.

“While AI tools are being used in cyberattacks, they are also becoming a more common tool in security analysis and influence how SOC teams work. Agent-based systems will be able to continuously scan infrastructure, identify vulnerabilities, and gather contextual information for investigations, reducing the amount of manual routine work.

“As a result, specialists will shift from manually searching for data to making decisions based on already-prepared context. In parallel, security tools will transition to natural-language interfaces, enabling prompts instead of complex technical queries,” adds Vladislav Tushkanov, Research Development Group Manager at Kaspersky.