CITITRUST Holdings Plc yesterday held a ground-breaking ceremony of its Cititrust place, a project which will serve as the national headquarters of the company.
Speaking at the ceremony, the Group Chief Executive, CITITRUST Holdings Plc, Mr Yemi Adefisan stated that, the Cititrust Place will be a three-storey ultra-modern building with a penthouse, adding that the project is planned to be completed in 12 months.
He said, “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 not only in Ikoyi, Lagos but also across Africa and Europe. He further stated that this is just the beginning of our journey as we have other milestones ahead of us to achieve.
“CITITRUST Place was conceived in 2018 to allow for our subsidiaries and Group Head office to be in a central location to reduce cost and save energy and also increase our turnaround time for all our processes in our service to all our African subsidiaries, UK and USA effectively.
“Regarding when it is going to be completed, we have a timeline of nine months. We also have the assurance of the contractor, Standard and Mutual Services Limited that they are going to beat the stipulated time. So hopefully, if they can do that in nine months, we will all gather here, invite people from all African Countries to join us in the official opening of the Cititrust Place,” he said.
While speaking on the business environment in Nigeria, Adefisan stated that the opportunities are endless but the challenge is communication.
“We are advocating on the need for regulators and the operators to collaborate and 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 said.
While speaking on the company’s target for the second quarter of 2021, he said, CITITRUST aims to invest more in its staff and technology.
He said, “The Covid-19 pandemic has thought us a lot in terms of doing business with technology. At the moment, we have our digital transformation ongoing, to the point where our customers do not need to come to our offices before a business is conducted.
“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. 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 case, when we look at challenges, we also look at opportunities. Challenges in terms of infrastructure development, we have spent money on advancing our technology, we hope that the government and those in telecommunication will be able to fast track the cyber optic, to ease the way of doing business as a lot of banking activities are done via digital nowadays.
