Fola Adeola and Tayo Aderinokun:
How unfettered friendship gave birth
to one of Africa’s biggest banks.
Neusroom’s Taofik Bankole x-rays how Fola Adeola and Tayo Aderinokun’s friendship birthed one of the biggest financial institutions in Nigeria.
Fola Adeola and Tayo Aderinokun: Founders Of GTBank.
Written by Taofik Bankole for Neusroom
27 May 2020
A Yoruba adage, ‘ogún omodé ò lè seré fún ogún odún’, popularly, and quite factually, posits that 20 children can’t be friends for 20 years. But for the ones that stand the test of time, such friendships tend to transcend merely exchanging handshakes and beer and hanging out at choice parks while fawning over beautiful women’s derrières.
Such friendships oftentimes result in a family bond that is as strong as a mother’s love for her child. The best ones even result in great accomplishments. Accomplishments such as the Guaranty Trust Bank.
GTB, one of Nigeria’s leading banks, with a retail customer base of more than eight million people, is a product of unfettered friendship between Fola Adeola and Tayo Aderinokun. Both men had become friends when their path crossed ways during their high school days.
That friendship, which Adeola describes as “teenage friendship”, led both men to found the progressive bank in 1990.
Before then, Adeola and Aderinokun had bravely embarked on a mission to provide a haircut service for the disadvantaged residents of Ikoyi, who, up to the mid 80s, would always take the long road to the mainland to have a fade, many times risking their lives.
“One of the challenges posed by living in Ikoyi in 1986 was that there were no barbers anywhere near-by! One, therefore, had to go to the Mainland for a simple haircut any time one was required. I was on one of these barber trips one Sunday when I saw a ghastly accident on Eko Bridge,
Adeola said in his tribute to Aderinokun following the latter’s sad passing in 2011. “The only thing that came to my mind was whether the victim of that accident was also on his way to the barbers! I decided we would put barbers in Ikoyi. The only person I knew that would entertain such a fanciful thought was Tayo Aderinokun. We both dipped into our pockets, and thus Finishing Touches Barbing Salon was born.”
A successful barbing salon was enough motivation for the friends, who were both on the roster of Continental Merchant Bank in 1986, to seek a license from the shot callers in Nigeria’s finance industry, for their own bank.
As is often common with friends who partner to found a company but get overwhelmed by the eventual success and wealth, Adeola and Aderinokun never allowed money to tear their friendship of many years, even dreaming to once again become neighbors by owning choice buildings on the Presidential Hilltop in Abeokuta.
Aderinokun, in an interview with City People shortly after he became the bank’s MD, said “What people often forget is that Fola and I were friends well before the bank came on the scene. We’ve been friends from our high school days. So, the relationship goes beyond business.”
Although that dream, one of many between the pair, never materialised due to Aderinokun’s premature death, the pair will dance and hold their heads up high as two friends that not only played for 20 years, but created a legacy while at it. Their legacy as one of Nigeria’s most innovative and successful friends has without a doubt been fully engraved in the country’s history.
Fola Adeola (Left) and Tayo Aderinokun (Right) pictured together.
“For me, the idea of a commercial bank never died. I revisited it with Tayo, and told him I was now prepared to go ahead, as I felt the window of opportunity for a license was narrowing.”
This was in January 1989,” Adeola said in his tribute to Aderinokun.
On August 2, 1990, the pair, who were both in their 30s, received a banking license No. 58, dated August 1, 1990 and signed by the Federal Minister for Finance, Chief Olu Falae, for Guaranty Trust Bank Limited.
From that moment on, both friends, with their education and wealth of experience (Adeola had obtained a Diploma in Accounting from Yaba College of Technology in 1975 and became a Chartered Accountant in 1980 following his training with Deloitte, Haskins and Sells and D.O. Dafinone & Company, while Aderinokun had obtained a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Lagos, and much later, an MBA in International Business from the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles in 1981), set their sights on creating one of Africa’s most trusted and profitable banks.
Today, GTB, which stands tall as Adeola and Aderinokun had envisioned, boasts of over 200 branches, 17 Cash Centres, 18 e-branches, 41 GTExpress locations and more than 1165 ATMs in Nigeria.
In Africa, the bank has expanded to Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, including the United Kingdom. The bank’s total assets are also estimated to be worth over N3 trillion.
Fola Adeola, the visionary who co-founded GTB with longtime friend.
If Fola Adeola looked back to the event that led to the creation of Guaranty Trust Bank in 1990, it wouldn’t be out of place to find him teary eyed. And why not, he was only in his 30s when his dream to own one of Africa’s biggest banks began to materialise.
Having obtained a Diploma in Accounting from Yaba College of Technology in 1975 and a Chartered Accountant certificate in 1980 following his training with Deloitte, Haskins and Sells and D.O. Dafinone & Company, Adeola set his sights on creating a commercial bank that would serve millions of people in his home country.
This dream, he would achieve with his “teenage friend”, Tayo Aderinokun, in 1990.
Before Adeola and Aderinokun founded GTB, the pair who were both on the roster of Continental Merchant Bank in the mid 80s, had collaborated to solve a simple but rare problem for residents of Ikoyi.
“One of the challenges posed by living in Ikoyi in 1986 was that there were no barbers anywhere near-by! One, therefore, had to go to the Mainland for a simple haircut any time one was required. I was on one of these barber trips one Sunday when I saw a ghastly accident on Eko Bridge,” Adeola said in his tribute to Aderinokun following the latter’s sad passing in 2011.
“The only thing that came to my mind was whether the victim of that accident was also on his way to the barbers! I decided we would put barbers in Ikoyi. The only person I knew that would entertain such a fanciful thought was Tayo Aderinokun. We both dipped into our pockets, and thus Finishing Touches Barbing Salon was born.”
But just as the business of providing the people in the upscale Lagos community a haircut service started to boom, Adeola’s focus started to shift elsewhere.
“For me, the idea of a commercial bank never died. I revisited it with Tayo, and told him I was now prepared to go ahead, as I felt the window of opportunity for a licence was narrowing. This was in January 1989,” Adeola reminisced in 2011.
In his 2015 article titled ‘The Curious Case of Young Generations’, Femi Pedro, one of the founding members of the bank, said “As of 1988 when we began the journey, Fola was 34, Tayo was 33, Gbolly was 33, Bode was 33, Akin was 35 and I was 33. The objective: To own a BANK. It was a bold objective considering our respective ages at the time, but certainly not an impossible task in our eyes.”
On August 2, 1990, Adeola received a banking license No. 58, dated August 1, 1990 and signed by the Federal Minister for Finance, Chief Olu Falae, for Guaranty Trust Bank Limited. And the bank became listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in 1996.
Fola Adeola.
Adeola would serve as the bank’s Managing Director for 12 years between 1990 and 2002, with Aderinokun right by his side as his able deputy and Femi Pedro, Gbolade Osibodu, Femi Akingbe, Akin Opeodu and others in tow. Aderinokun would later take over the reigns as MD of GTB after Adeola stepped down in 2002 and held the position until his death in 2011.
Today, GTB, which stands tall as Adeola and Aderinokun had envisioned, boasts of over 200 branches, 17 Cash Centres, 18 e-branches, 41 GTExpress locations and more than 1165 ATMs in Nigeria. In Africa, the bank has expanded to Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda, including the United Kingdom. The bank’s total assets are also estimated to be worth over N3 trillion.
Since vacating the seat as the MD of GTB, Adeola has served as the chairman of UTC, ARM, Lotus Capital, Eterna Oil, CardinalStone Partners Limited, Tafsan Breweries (board member), and Credit Registry Services.
As the chairman of Main One Cable Company Limited, Adeola oversaw the complete construction of an open access submarine cable system that spanned 14,000 kilometres in 2010.
He has also tested his feet in the public sector and in politics, serving as running mate to former Economic and Financial Crimes Commission chairman (EFCC) Nuhu Ribadu in the 2011 presidential elections.
Married with six children, Adeola was decorated as Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR) in December 2002 by President Olusegun Obasanjo.
Despite all of his achievements, Adeola has made it clear that his friendship with Aderinokun which was the bedrock of GTB’s birth is one he’ll forever hold dear, going on to say in his tribute to his deceased friend and partner in 2011, “I will always reserve for myself the credit for partnering with Tayo.”
Remembering Tayo Aderinokun, the goal getter who co-founded GTB with his ‘teenage friend’
“As we grew up, Tayo always shared his life’s desires with me. Two very important objectives he always emphasized. One was to be very rich, and he would add, ‘very, very rich’; the other was to be managing director of a bank. He accomplished both. I would ask him, often, what would you do with such wealth? And he would laugh, and reply, ‘wait until I get it.'”
That was Fola Adeola extolling the drive of his friend and partner, Tayo Aderinokun in a tribute following the latter’s passing in 2011.
Aderinokun had an interesting childhood. His father was a technician who worked for the Nigerian Railway Corporation. He had his basic education at Baptist Day School, Kano, from 1961 to 1966, before the Civil War forced his family to relocate to Lagos. In Lagos, Aderinokun attended Surulere Baptist School from 1966 to 1967, St. Peter’s College, Abeokuta, from 1968 to 1972 and St. Gregory’s Boys College, Lagos from 1973 to 1974.
It was during this period that he forged an unfettered friendship and brotherly bond with Adeola. They both later worked at the Continental Merchant Bank in the mid 80s before Aderinokun moved to Prime Merchant Bank where he occupied the position of an Assistant General Manager and Head, Financial Services.
“I finished from the University of Lagos and I went for my NYSC and got posted to Central Bank, through normal posting,” Aderinokun recalled his first romance with banking in an interview with City People.
He went on to say,
“immediately after that, I went abroad to get an MBA. I finished my MBA at UCLA and I came back to Nigeria. At that time, banking was it, with all the glamour. They paid better, the suits were sharper. Glamour seemed to work. That was how I started and I found out that I liked it. And it was something I did very well.”
In their 30s, the “teenage friends” decided to collaborate to found one of Africa’s biggest banks in 1990, following the success of their barbing salon, Finishing Touches Barbing Salon, in the mid 80s.
Aderinokun, born in 1955, had been convinced by an ambitious Adeola to start a commercial bank that would serve millions of people in Nigeria. That bank would be named Guaranty Trust Bank.
On August 2, 1990, Adeola and Aderinokun received a banking license No. 58, dated August 1, 1990 and signed by the Federal Minister for Finance, Chief Olu Falae, for Guaranty Trust Bank Limited. The bank became listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in 1996.
Aderinokun who held a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Lagos, and an MBA in International Business which he obtained in 1981 from the Graduate School of Management, University of California, Los Angeles, went on to serve as Adeola’s deputy for the 12 years the latter held the position as the bank’s Managing Director between 1990 to 2002.
“Now, we are going into a new phase which may be for me more challenging, because I have to play 2 roles. So, I have to start looking for somebody who will play either the role Fola was playing or the role I was playing before. That is really the challenge I am facing,” Aderinokun told City People shortly after he assumed the position as GTB’s new MD.
And he took on the challenge fantastically well.
Tayo Aderinokun.
When Aderinokun took over the reign as MD after his friend stepped down from the position, his experience and dedication to excellence were immediately in full glare. Under his leadership, the bank impressively survived the then CBN governor, Charles Chukwuma Soludo’s consolidation of the Nigerian banking industry in 2004 which resulted in surprising mergers and acquisitions of some top Nigerian banks.
He received many awards for his outstanding leadership, including many others for GTB.
Aderinokun held the position until June 2011 when he shockingly died from cancer aged 56. His death reverberated through the entire banking and finance industry.
In his tribute to his departed friend and partner, Adeola commended Aderinokun “for sustaining the vision, and taking the bank so much higher to a realm I know I could never have taken it to,” adding that under Aderinokun’s leadership, “the bank simply grew in leaps and bounds.”
Today, GTB, which stands tall as Adeola and Aderinokun had envisioned, boasts of over 200 branches, 17 Cash Centres, 18 e-branches, 41 GTExpress locations and more than 1165 ATMs in Nigeria. The bank’s total assets are also estimated to be worth over N3 trillion.
Before his death, Aderinokun founded the Day Waterman College, a co-educational boarding school for children. He left behind a wife and three children.
