Nigeria’s biggest banks including Access Bank, Zenith Bank, First Bank, UBA, GTBank, Fidelity Bank, Stanbic IBTC and Union Bank are under growing fire after new financial figures revealed that trillions of naira have been quietly pulled out of Nigerians’ accounts through endless fees and hidden deductions.
In 2024 alone, these banks made about ₦2.6 trillion from charges and commissions taken directly from customers through SMS alerts, transfer fees, card charges, stamp duties, account maintenance and digital banking levies.
This is not loan income or investment returns, it is money skimmed from everyday Nigerians trying to use their own accounts.
In just the first three months of 2025, eight of these banks collected ₦643.9 billion from electronic banking and transaction charges, meaning Nigerians were losing more than ₦7 billion every single day simply for moving their own money. On top of that, banks also pocketed over ₦113 billion from current account maintenance fees, even from accounts that barely had activity.
For millions of low-income Nigerians, this has become financial suffocation. Small transfers trigger multiple layers of charges, while people are billed for ATM cards they never use and SMS alerts they never requested. Many customers say their balances are being eaten up slowly, transaction by transaction, until nothing is left.
Social media is now flooded with complaints of accounts wiped out by fees, unexplained debits and silent deductions, deepening the sense that the banking system has turned into a cash-extraction machine rather than a service for the public.
As banks announce record profits in the middle of rising poverty and inflation, anger is growing over how much of that profit is being built on the daily bleeding of ordinary Nigerians’ accounts, raising a disturbing question: are banks still serving customers or simply harvesting them?
