Investor. Entrepreneur. Philanthropist.
Anthony Onyemaechi Elumelu
Tony O. Elumelu is one of Africa’s leading investors and philanthropists. He is the Founder and Chairman of Heirs Holdings, his family-owned investment company, committed to improving lives and transforming Africa, through long-term investments in strategic sectors of the African economy, including financial services, hospitality, power, energy, technology and healthcare. Tony is the Chairman of pan-African financial services group, the United Bank for Africa (UBA), which operates in 20 countries across Africa, the United Kingdom, France, the UAE, and is the only African bank with a commercial deposit taking presence in the United States. UBA provides corporate, commercial, SME and consumer banking services to more than 35 million customers globally. He also chairs Nigeria’s largest quoted conglomerate, Transcorp, whose subsidiaries include Transcorp Power, one of the leading producers of electricity in Nigeria and Transcorp Hotels Plc, Nigeria’s foremost hospitality brand. He is the Founder and Chairman of Heirs Energies, an upstream oil and gas company, whose assets include Nigerian oil block OML17, with a current production capacity of 50,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day and 2P reserves of 1.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent, with an additional 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent resources of further exploration potential. Heirs Energies is committed to creating resource-based added value on the African continent.
01
EARLY LIFE
1963
-1993
Education and the Beginning of Entrepreneurship
Nigerian-born and Nigerian-trained, Tony began his career as a copier salesman. He spent most of his career life in banking, rising from the position of an analyst to become the CEO of pan-African financial services group, United Bank for Africa.
In 2010, Tony left banking to the next chapter of his life as an investor and a philanthropist, channelling his passion, commitment, and dedication to realising the development of the African continent. Tony's investments span a wide range of sectors and are spread across 20 African countries and beyond. Tony is married to Dr Awele Vivien Elumelu. They are blessed with seven lovely children.
02
EARLY CAREER
1997
-2004
The TurnAround Expert
A year after earning his Master's degree in Economics from the
University of Lagos, Tony applied to join Allstates Trust Bank, despite not meeting the qualification criteria. By a stroke of luck, the CEO of the bank came across his application letter, and he was handpicked to
interview. He subsequently got the job.
At 26, Tony was offered the opportunity of a lifetime to become a
branch manager at AllStates Trust Bank, making him the youngest bank branch manager in the country at the time. This opportunity influenced his life, prompting him to give young employees the same opportunity he was given. Tony's success in this role ignited his passion for investing in the lives of young people.
Tony's accomplishments became public when he achieved the
seemingly impossible. He was relatively unknown in the Nigerian
banking industry when he acquired a distressed financial institution,
Crystal Bank and became its CEO; an action that earned him and his
circle of peers, the endearing nickname - "the cowboys of banking".
Audacious at 34 – and the country's youngest banking CEO – he
renamed the struggling bank Standard Trust Bank (STB) and pursued an aggressive strategy that catapulted STB from obscurity into becoming Nigeria's fifth-largest bank within seven years.
03
BANKING YEARS
2005
-2009
The biggest merger in sub-Saharan Africa
In 2005, Tony made history again when he led the biggest merger in sub-Saharan Africa at the time combining Standard Trust Bank Plc with the older, more established United Bank for Africa (UBA), which at the time was Nigeria's 3rd largest financial services institution. In less than ten years, he transformed UBA from a single-country bank to a pan-African institution with over 1million customers, operations in 20 African countries, and offices in Paris, London, and New York. This action sealed his reputation as a business turnaround expert and one of Africa's most influential business leaders.
