The Central Bank of Nigeria says about 20 deposit money banks have already met the new capital thresholds set under the ongoing banking recapitalisation programme, as the apex bank turns its attention to ensuring that stronger balance sheets support increased credit to the real sector.

The disclosure was made by the CBN’s Deputy Governor for Economic Policy, Dr Muhammad Abdullahi, on Thursday during a panel session at the launch of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group’s 2026 Macroeconomic Outlook in Lagos.

It was earlier reported that at the final Monetary Policy Committee meeting of 2025, the Governor of the CBN, Olayemi Cardoso, revealed that 16 banks had fully complied with the revised capital requirements ahead of the deadline.

Abdullahi said the recapitalisation programme was aimed at strengthening banks to enable them support Nigeria’s aspiration of becoming a trillion-dollar economy.

“I think that even at the inception of the capitalisation programme, the major focus is how do we ensure that we have stronger banks that can support our drive towards a trillion-dollar economy? And the only way to get there is through the credit-review sector, to SMEs, to businesses that require funding at good rates. So as we close up towards March, I mean, the efforts have been quite impressive. We have about 20 banks that have already met it. A number of banks are meeting it every day.

“They’re huge. It’s very busy within CBN today, tomorrow, and through to March, as you can imagine.”

He however, stressed that recapitalisation alone is not sufficient, noting that attention must now move beyond larger balance sheets to productive and sustainable lending.

“The focus that we really are turning our attention to, especially from the financial system stability side, is that we ensure that a strengthened capital base translates into credit that is productive, that is well-targeted, and that is sustainable,” he said.

He said the CBN has spent the past year enhancing its regulatory capacity through technology to ensure that the gains from recapitalisation are effectively channelled to priority sectors of the economy.

“The entire work we’ve been doing institutionally over the last year is to ensure that the Central Bank itself improves its regulation capacity through using technology to ensure that we can actually monitor that the effects of this capitalisation translate into real sector credit to SMEs,” Abdullahi said.

He added that the apex bank would step in where banks fail to deploy their expanded capital base toward productive lending.

Beyond the banking sector, Abdullahi said Nigeria faces a major development finance gap, estimating the country’s funding requirements at about N230tn across key sectors.

“Nigeria needs about N230tn in terms of development finance for various sectors. The capitalisation on average for all of the development finance institutions combined is not up to nine trillion naira, so there’s a huge gap,” he asserted.

He said attention is now on attracting private sector capital, from both local and foreign sources, to help close the financing gap.

The recapitalisation programme, which commenced in 2024, stipulates a minimum capital base of N500 billion for commercial banks with international licences, N200 billion for national banks, and N50 billion for regional banks. For non-interest banks, the requirements are N20 billion for national operators and N10 billion for regional institutions.