KEY POINTS

• FirstBank has announced sponsorship of Global Trade Review West Africa 2026, a two-day trade and finance conference taking place this week in Lagos.
• Olayinka Ijabiyi, acting group head of marketing and corporate communications, says the bank is leveraging its six West African subsidiaries and platforms like PAPSS to drive regional trade.
• The event is expected to draw about 450 delegates from 200 companies and 15 countries, with 45 speakers including FirstBank, UAC of Nigeria, Standard Bank Group, ACIOE Associates and SkyKapital executives.

FirstBank has signed on as a sponsor of Global Trade Review West Africa 2026, the two-day trade and finance conference opening in Lagos this week, as the Nigerian lender builds its visibility across the region’s trade-finance circuit. The bank is also betting that sponsorship visibility converts into deeper client relationships across its regional subsidiaries.

The gathering, a fixture on the sub-Saharan trade-finance calendar, should draw about 450 delegates from 200 companies and 15 countries, with 45 speakers on the agenda. Over two days, sessions will run across agribusiness, hard commodities, risk mitigation and infrastructure development, digging into the dynamics shaping trade flows across West Africa.

Bank leans on its regional footprint

FirstBank has spent years building out a West African footprint that now stretches across six subsidiaries, and the sponsorship lets the bank plant its flag in front of the region’s trade-finance community. That physical reach, the bank argues, is the lever it wants to use to convert trade intelligence into actual cross-border deals.

Olayinka Ijabiyi, acting group head of marketing and corporate communications at FirstBank, said the bank is leaning into that footprint to push business development across its countries of operations. Specifically, he pointed to the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, or PAPSS, as one of the platforms driving down friction in intra-African transactions.

“FirstBank is playing a leading role in driving trade and investment across sub-Saharan Africa,” Ijabiyi said. He added that platforms like PAPSS are “enhancing intra-African transaction efficiency, empowering SMEs and corporates, and supporting the competitiveness of businesses across Africa.”

Speakers come from banks and corporates

The two-day agenda pulls together FirstBank voices alongside regional heavyweights. On the FirstBank side, Nneka Korley-Ndahi heads transaction banking sales while Oluseye Thomas leads export, structured trade finance and trade solutions. They also join Queenette Durosinmi-Etti, chief operating officer at UAC of Nigeria, and Adesanmi Adedayo, senior vice president for structured trade finance at Standard Bank Group.

Others on the speaker list include Innocent Isichei, chief executive of ACIOE Associates, and Karim Ezzeddine, vice president at SkyKapital. The cross-section of banks and advisory firms mirrors the crowd the conference typically pulls.

Finally, the sponsorship fits a familiar playbook. Nigerian tier-one lenders have been leaning harder into regional trade branding as cross-border payment rails open up under frameworks like PAPSS and the African Continental Free Trade Area, while the Lagos conference gives FirstBank a prime platform to court the clients riding those flows. Whether the pitch translates into new business depends on what happens in the conversations between sessions.