Over the past two years, Ecobank Nigeria’s legal team has modified its focus to accelerate the realisation of the bank’s strategic objectives. The legal department now has specialised teams, which aim to efficiently manage complex issues arising throughout the country.

Legal officers have been deployed to various Ecobank affiliates and units to provide strategic support on a number of specialised and sensitive assignments. In addition to overseeing this restructuring, Ecobank Nigeria’s legal department has also reduced the bank’s contingent liability and cost. The bank has received praise from the legal sector for the way it has embraced alternative dispute resolution (ADR); the legal team’s adoption of this approach has had widespread impact on dispute resolution throughout the industry. Another area of excellence for the team has been the introduction of technical and organisational innovations.

One such innovation was an enhanced automated legal search module, utilised as an interface between the bank and external lawyers for the conduct of corporate searches. Says chief legal officer Adenike Laoye: ‘Through the legal search module, requests for corporate searches are initiated by the various branches within the bank’s network, reports are uploaded by external solicitors and applicable payments are processed’. The team also recently launched the first electronic document management system within Ecobank Group, which now allows for the retrieval of documents without the handling physical paper. However, the team’s excellence is not purely operational, having played key roles in a number of transactions for the bank as well.

Two major acquisitions involving the largest independent telecom infrastructure in Africa have recently been completed. The first transaction had a valuation of $600m and represented the acquisition of all passive assets, the second deal was for the acquisition of another telecom company’s passive assets including base stations valued at $800m.