By Shedrack Akunna (Science and Technology Reporter)
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of First Bank of Nigeria Limited, Mr Olusegun Alebiosu, on Thursday, led a delegation of his bank's executive on a strategic follow-up visit to the Minister of Science and Innovation, Dr Kingsley Udeh, in Abuja.
The visit was an opportunity for the management of the bank to deepen high-level engagements with the Ministry on institutional partnership frameworks for the commercialisation of research outputs under the Energize Commercialisation Now (ECoN) initiative.
Their discussions, according to the Minister, were anchored on constructing a robust innovation-financing architecture capable of systematically bridging the interface between scientific discovery and market deployment within Nigeria’s evolving knowledge economy.
"This engagement builds on an earlier bilateral meeting in the United Kingdom, where, in the context of the State Visit alongside Bola Ahmed Tinubu, I interfaced with the First Bank leadership to explore sustainable and scalable financing pathways for Nigerian researchers and innovators", the minister explains, adding that "At the core of that dialogue was the imperative of leveraging the Bank’s financial intermediation capacity, as well as its strategic alliances with European investment partners, to mobilize patient capital, de-risk innovation pipelines, and catalyse the growth of commercially viable enterprises".
Dr Udeh stated that 'These engagements reflect a deepening alignment between public policy and financial capital in advancing innovation-led industrialisation.
"They reaffirm our shared commitment to building an integrated ecosystem in which government provides coherent regulatory and policy frameworks, while the financial sector deploys capital and investment intelligence to transform indigenous research outputs into globally competitive assets capable of driving sustainable economic growth", said the Minister. NNL.
