First Bank, CFA harp on business values, ethics

First Bank of Nigeria Limited (FBN) and Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) Society Nigeria have stressed the need for ethical investment behaviours among youths in the country, as part of efforts to promote fundamental business values, corporate rules and procedures.

Besides, the duo argued that for businesses to thrive, people must ensure the sanctity of trust, high level of integrity and professionalism in all dealings.

These formed the crux of discussions as FBN and CFA Institute hosted the Universities’ Ethics Challenge in Lagos, aimed at offering business courses to expose students to ethical realities in the investment industry as future players, as well as assessing their sense of judgment on critical issues.

Speaking on the essence of the bank’s partnership in the programme, Head, Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, First Bank, Ismail Omamegbe, said the initiative was in line with an aspect of the bank’s institutional values and purpose of existence.

This, according to him was the belief of the financial institution’s corporate governance, ethics and integrity.

He stressed that the bank had impacted positively on the society as part of the nation building.

“But we do think that when you have to build institutions you have to build from the scratch, you have to be able to lay certain foundation. And we believe that the CFA Society and CFA Institute is a global organisation that focuses on integrity and ethics and research, and one of the ways to help them do that is to partner with them to get this done,” he noted.

However, FirstBank said the event aligns with its Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability approach to education, which fits into the theme of one of its endowment programmes in Nigerian Universities, ‘The Samuel Asabia Chair for Business Ethics at the University of Lagos’.

Speaking on the importance of the challenge, CFA President, Banji Fehintola, said the programme is very important because the whole financial institutions in Nigeria thrives on ethics.

Fehintola said: “What we are doing is to partner with institutions to start talking to schools before they come into the investment industry, inculcating in them ethical principles that we think will make the industry to be sustainable in the long run”.

He said the CFA society is doing its best to improve the level of ethics and professionalism in the industry.

He added: “If people who are investing do not trust the people they are giving their money, then you have a serious problem because investment thrives on trust; I know the future of the industry is very bright, we are building an industry that will be very ethical and more professional in the future”.

However, the first edition winner, University of Lagos won the competition again and was presented with the trophy at the CFA Nigeria award dinner.