First HoldCo Plc, Nigeria’s most valuable banking group by market capitalisation, says it expects profit before tax to exceed N1.2 trillion ($876 million) for the full year 2026, as its recapitalisation drive and a clean-up of legacy bad loans begin to pay off.

The Chief Executive Officer of FirstBank, Olusegun Alebiosu, disclosed the projection in an interview with Bloomberg.

The First HoldCo boss tied his improved outlook to fresh capital deployed from the Group’s ongoing recapitalisation programme, tighter cost control, and stronger recoveries from its non-performing loan book.

First HoldCo recovered N60 billion in bad loans so far this year, part of a broader push to clean up its balance sheet.

The Group has cut both operating and funding costs, supporting margin expansion in the first half.

Net income for H1 2026 rose 82 per cent year-on-year to N522.7 billion, a sharp reversal from the prior year.

The 2025 profit had collapsed by 94 per cent after the bank set aside heavy provisions following the Central Bank of Nigeria’s directive ending regulatory forbearance on delinquent loans.

Alebiosu expects the non-performing loan (NPL) ratio to fall below 10 per cent by next year, down from 13.9 per cent currently, as the bank restructures troubled oil-sector exposures.

First HoldCo’s turnaround comes on the back of one of the sharpest re-ratings on the Nigerian Exchange this year.

The Group recently overtook Zenith Bank and GTCO to become Nigeria’s most valuable lender by market capitalisation, with its share price more than doubling in 2026 to a record N110 per share.

The rally follows a string of capital-raising milestones, including a N253 billion multi-tranche capital programme approved by shareholders in May.

First HoldCo targets to push its paid-up capital to N1 trillion to cement its compliance with the CBN’s revised minimum capital requirements for banks with international authorisation.

However, not everyone is convinced the earnings momentum is fully organic.

Analysts at Lagos-based ARM Securities noted that the growth was not driven by lending activity, cautioning that sustaining the pace of profit growth would depend on the bank’s ability to preserve margins and keep generating trading, FX, and recovery-related income, sources of earnings that tend to be less predictable than core lending income.

First HoldCo’s 2025 financial year was defined by a deliberate balance sheet reset: the Group absorbed a large impairment charge tied to CBN’s forbearance directive, which forced banks to fully provision for previously restructured loans.

That one-off hit dragged full-year profit down sharply, setting a low base against which 2026’s rebound now looks dramatic.

The N1.2 trillion PBT target, if achieved, would represent a significant scale-up from the N653.54 billion pre-tax profit First HoldCo posted for H1 2026 alone.

This suggests that management expects the momentum from loan recoveries and cost discipline to be sustained, if not improved, through the second half of the year.

The Group’s non-banking arms, investment banking and asset management, have also started contributing more meaningfully to earnings diversification, a trend First HoldCo has flagged as central to its long-term growth strategy beyond traditional banking income.

The share price of the stock rose sharply from about N69.20 on July 10 to close at N110 on Wednesday, July 22, indicating about 58.9 per cent increase in barely two weeks.

Whether the bank can hit the N1.2 trillion mark will likely hinge on the same factors ARM Securities flagged: how well it holds onto its improved margins, and whether trading, FX, and recovery gains, rather than core lending, continue to carry the bulk of the earnings growth into year-end.