Banks contest for top position i.e. No1 bank in Nigeria, the most capitalised bank, the first in this and that. All these resulted in cut throat competition to be in league of No1 bank or the top tier. The industry has been stratified into top 5 banks, top 10 banks and others.

Battle for top 5 appears to be hottest where you have the likes of Firstbank Union bank, United Bank for Africa, Intercontinental Bank, Zenith, Oceanic bank and GTBank have been in this rat race since after consolidation. This has been the breeding ground of high profile de-marketing.

The top 10 banks were up coming and fast driving banks, playing in another hot platform for de-marketing. Those in this category includes BankPHB, Diamond Bank, Access, Afribank, Fidelity, FCMB, Ecobank and a few others. This group posses two driving spirits (I.)Pull down any of the seven earlier mentioned and displaced them in the big boys category. (ii.) to distinguish themselves as having arrived and create impression that they are equally big and a force to reckon with or at least on a class of its own different from the others in category 3.

The scenarios is the battle for key accounts, where the market size has become for blue chip borrowers and large cash cow accounts have narrowed considerably to few public sector entities and government with equally fewer private or corporate accounts. Clash of banks jostling to take positions breed fierce acrimony, a veritable ground to breed de-marketing.

There is also the suspicion that old generation banks are not comfortable with the speed of rise of some new generation banks and with the threat of dethroning them from their traditional positions they have to be checkmated.

Finally, and what precipitated the latest de-marketing could be connected with year-end antics of banks, the behaviour of banks in the time past has always been to help one another in the interbank deposit market, with a view to boosting their deposit figures for balance sheet reporting. Thus bank A would agree with another set of banks to take internal deposits to beef up, its books such that after bank A’s year-end, the bank would take position to give corresponding treatment to the others during their own year end. Thus the banks have staggered there year end, between February and December (Its Only January that does not have a bank’s financial year –end). This unholy alliance had made CBN to roll out plans for a uniform year end mid last year, but this was vehemently frustrated by some banks, forcing CBN to abandon the plan.

However, with the need to sanitise, strengthen and straighten out things in the banking industry CBN and the Bankers Committee had to agree to a uniform year-end early in March 2009, to be effective Dec2009, this development formally broke the unholy alliance forcing every bank to be on its own for the purpose of year end.

Again the banks are back to the trenches employing all forms of tactics to meet there year-end target. This circumstance was worsened because most of the banks have their year-end between March and July; almost over 70% of the banks belong to this category, making the competition stiffer. Thus de-marketing option appears inevitable, especially for some that are desperate to retain their status.

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