Cititrust Holdings Plc yesterday held a ground-breaking ceremony of its Cititrust place, a project that will serve as national headquarters of the company.
Speaking at the ceremony, Group Chief Executive, Cititrust holdings Plc, Yemi Adefisan said, the Cititrust Place is a three-storey ultra-modern building with penthouse, adding that the project is planned to be completed in 12 months.
“The building upon completion, will serve as the national headquarter of Cititrust Holdings Plc, and will occupy all the management staff of all our subsidiaries. The corporate development will be a landmark development not only in ikoyi, Lagos but also across Africa and in the international space. This is just the beginning of our journey as we have other milestones ahead of us to achieve”, he said.
“Cititrust Place was conceived in 2018 to allow all our subsidiaries and Group Head office to be in a place so that we can reduce our cost and save a lot of energy. You will agree with me that cost of running generators and other infrastructure in a business like ours, requires a lot. So if we are in a place, we are going to reduce a lot of cost and also reduce a lot of energy as well,” he added.
“What we hope to achieve with this development is cost reduction. In addition to that, we also want to be in place so that there will be a quick turnaround time for all our processes. I don’t need to speak to someone in Maryland or Ikoyi or VI, they are just within my office, so we can quickly turn around and service all our African subsidiaries, UK and USA effectively. So that is one of the most important reasons why we are having Cititrust Place”, he stressed.
“Regarding when it is going to be completed, we have a time line of nine months. We also have the assurance of the contractor, Standard and Mutual Services Limited that they are going to beat the time. So hopefully, if they are able to do that, we are rest assured that in nine months, we will all be here and we are going to invite people from all African Countries to join us in the official opening of the Cititrust Place,” GCE Maintained.
While speaking on business environment in Nigeria, he said, the environment is there but the challenge is communication.
“So what we are advocating and what we are advising is there is need for regulators and the operators to collaborate to continue to re-orientate the investing public on how Nigeria can be able to come up with policies that can aid the continuation of investment and bringing direct investment to Nigeria,” he stated.
While speaking on the company’s target for the second quarter of 2021, he said, Cititrust aims at to invest more in its staff because they run the business for over Africa, adding that it will also invest in technology.
He said, “The Covid-19 pandemic has thought us a lot in terms of doing business with technology. So we have our digital transformation going on, why you don’t need to come to our office before you do your business. So we are investing more in digitalization of Cititrust. The third one is that we want to focus on investment deals; we want to see how we can bring a lot of investment into Nigeria and Africa at large. So we are speaking to multilateral development finance institutions to bring more investment into the country.
On challenges facing businesses in Nigeria, Adefisan said, “Every business has its challenges but in our own case, when we look at challenges, we also look at opportunities. Challenges in terms of infrastructure development, we have spent money for IT, we hope that the government and those in telecommunication will be able to fast tract the cyber optic, so that we can access to internet because of a lot of banking activities are done via digital banking nowadays.
“Second issue is that we spend a lot in terms of energy, by and large, we are trying to look at what we can do to support those who are in telecoms to see how we can see that Fintechs is done in the right way,” he said.
