ABSTRACT

Financial sector play a vital role in the development of any economy. Over the years banks in Nigeria have experienced serious financial crisis and failure. This has led to distrust and defeat of expectation and objectives. These uncertainties and risk situations have occasioned several CBN policies. One of such is the capitalization policy .In line with the need to attain capitalization policy, some banks merged while other acquired. This study ascertain the effect of merger on the performance of banks in Nigeria with a particular reference to United Bank of Africa PLC, using profit after tax, Net assets and earnings per share as proxy to measure performance. Descriptive and ex-post facto methodology was adopted. The research made use of secondary data obtained from the bank's annual reports and statement of account covering a period of 2001-2009. The work ascertained the performance of bank pre and post-merger period using one sample t-Test. The results showed that merger has positive significant effects on the performance of banks in Nigeria. Based on the findings, the study recommend that banks should be more aggressive in their profit derive to reap the benefit of post-merger bid and merger should become an integral part of CBN policy on long term business strategy for commercial banks in Nigeria.