by Tobi Olayiwola From the first pay cheque you ever received to the estate your children will eventually settle, a retail bank is present at almost every financial inflection point of a person's life. No other commercial relationship spans that kind of arc. And yet most retail banks still treat trust as a brand metric, something to be managed in the communications department, measured in quarterly NPS surveys, and periodically refreshed with a new campaign. It is not a br

Written By Tobi Olayiwola | 25 May 2026 According to a study by the Faculty of Education, University of Delta, the quality of a company is directly related to the number of adequately skilled employees engaged in that business. Where is the lie? The same is true for a country, for Nigeria. The more problem solving hands Nigeria produces per profession, the better the country is for it. I’ll use accounting as a case in point, since I’m a qualified accountant. “Accounting is

Most companies are not losing ground because they lack data. They are losing ground because they cannot move fast enough with the data they already have. AI is changing that. Not in theory, in practice, and at pace. The question for senior leadership is no longer whether AI belongs in commercial strategy. It is whether your organisation is building the right foundations to benefit from it. The Shift That Is Already Happening AI adoption in sales and marketing is not a futur

A customer logs into your banking app at 11pm on a Tuesday. They have just completed an international transfer, their daughter's first university tuition payment. It is a large, one-time transaction. They close the app and go to bed. By Wednesday morning, a competitor fintech has already sent them a notification: "Planning for education costs? See how we can help." Their bank, the one that processed the transfer, holds their salary, manages their mortgage, and stores th

By Grace Anisulowo The ROI Problem Is No Longer Theoretical Recent analysis from Bloomberg shows returns are weakening across business education. ROI has fallen at four out of five US business schools Median ROI dropped from 13.3% to 12.6% Pre-MBA salaries rose 6.2%, but post-MBA gains increased only 1.7% The gap that justified the investment is narrowing. More concerning: nearly 40% of MBA programmes now deliver negative ROI, graduates are financially worse off. The pattern

— Grace Anisulowo The institutions winning on enrolment in 2026 are not the ones with the most prestigious names. They are the ones with the clearest answers to the question every prospective student is now asking. The Recruitment Model Most Universities Are Still Running Is Broken Let me be direct. A significant portion of higher education institutions are still marketing to a student that no longer exists. The student who chose a university based on campus aesthetics, ranki

Every year, institutions invest in marketing to attract prospective students. Many invest considerably less in what happens after the first click. The result is a structural leak. Students arrive, look around, and leave, not because they lost interest, but because the digital experience failed them. Inaccessible information, premature data requests, and poorly calibrated personalisation are not minor inconveniences. They are the points at which tuition revenue quietly disappe

This is not a prediction. It is an observation of what is already happening. Platforms with conversational AI convert at 12% versus 3% for standard journeys. AI logistics automation cuts operational costs by up to 30%. AI chatbots reduce support queries by up to 90%. AI-driven personalisation delivers 81% conversion lift. The platforms that are winning did not bolt AI onto existing systems. They rebuilt their operating models around AI from the ground up. The platforms that