GTCO made ₦278.5 billion from transaction fees and commissions in 2025

There is a version of GTCO that most Nigerians know. Orange branding, long queues at Guaranty Trust Bank branches, a mobile app that works most of the time.

That version of the company earned ₦2.15 trillion in gross earnings in 2025, posted a profit before tax of ₦1.23 trillion, and recommended a final dividend of ₦11.76 per share. By any measure, it is a very successful Nigerian bank.

But buried inside the 2025 audited financial statements, released in March 2026, is a different story worth reading carefully, one about a company quietly repositioning itself around digital infrastructure while the traditional banking narrative absorbs most of the attention.

The GTCO number that stands out

GTCO’s fee and commission income grew from ₦221.2 billion in 2024 to ₦278.5 billion in 2025. That is a 26% jump in a single year, and it is the kind of growth that does not happen from branch transactions and paper forms.

Within that broader surge, e-business income specifically grew from ₦56.6 billion to ₦64.7 billion, a 14.4% increase that makes it one of the fastest-growing individual line items in the group’s income statement.

Read also: GTCO announces completion of N10 billion capital raise

E-business income is the revenue GTCO earns from digital transactions, electronic payments, internet banking activity, and related digital channels.

When that number grows 14.4% in a year where overall gross earnings were nearly flat at ₦2.15 trillion compared to ₦2.148 trillion the previous year, it tells you something important. The bank’s physical business is holding steady, but its digital business is doing the actual growing.

HabariPay is more than a fintech label

In 2021, GTCO restructured into a holding company with four direct subsidiaries. Most people remember the banking subsidiary, GTBank.

Fewer pay attention to HabariPay Limited, the group’s payments fintech arm, which sits quietly inside the structure doing something the parent company used to outsource entirely.

The 2025 financial statements describe HabariPay operating across three distinct business verticals.

• The first is a payment gateway processing transactions via virtual accounts, USSD, card, and bank transfer channels for merchants ranging from micro-businesses to large corporates.
• The second is a switching vertical, handling account-to-account bank transfers and card transactions through HabariPay’s own payment switch.
• The third is a value-added vertical managing bill payments, airtime vending, and bulk SMS distribution through NCC-licensed aggregators.

That is a payments infrastructure company with multiple revenue lines, operating inside one of Nigeria’s largest financial groups, not a fintech experiment. The distinction matters because it changes how you read GTCO’s long-term strategy.

Read also: GTCO records N2.78 trillion in debit card transactions in H1’25

The naira card and the POS move

GTCO’s 2025 sustainability report, included in the same filing, notes two product decisions that deserve more attention than they received.

The first is the launch of a Naira Card for global transactions, offering a $4,000 quarterly limit for online and POS purchases. The second is the implementation of zero processing fees on all of the bank’s POS terminals.

Both moves are aimed at the same competitive space that fintech entities have been chipping away at for years. The Naira Card goes after Nigerians who want to spend in dollars online without the friction of a domiciliary account.

The zero POS fee targets merchants who have been told repeatedly, including by fintech platforms, that traditional banks are too expensive to work with.

What the numbers are actually saying

Nigeria’s fintech sector has spent the better part of a decade building the argument that banks are slow, expensive, and structurally unsuited to serve the digital economy. Some of that argument was true, and some banks believed it enough to stay out of the fight.

Suleiman Barau, Group Chairman, GTCO

GTCO does not appear to be one of them.

A payments subsidiary running three infrastructure verticals, a 26% surge in fee and commission income, e-business revenue growing at 14.4% in a year when top-line earnings barely moved, a new Naira Card, and zero-fee POS terminals add up to a company that has been making deliberate technology bets for several years and is now showing the returns.

The question the 2025 financials quietly raise is not whether GTCO is a good bank. It clearly is. The more interesting question is whether, five years from now, the banking subsidiary will still be the most important part of the holding company or whether HabariPay and the digital infrastructure it is building will have taken that place.

The numbers are not there yet. But the direction is becoming harder to ignore.

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