Stanbic IBTC celebrates the International Women’s Day with women all over the country.
Yewande Sadiku is CEO Designate of Stanbic IBTC Capital Limited, the Stanbic IBTC Group’s investment banking business. She manages key relationships with regulators and several of Nigeria’s leading corporate and multinational clients. She has been part of Stanbic IBTC’s management team for over a decade and has been involved in several landmark transactions in the history of the Nigerian capital market.
Yewande was featured as one of “35 International Women under 35” by World Business magazine in 2007. She has a keen personal interest in bringing organized financing to Nigerian film productions. In 2010 she became inspired during an Eisenhower fellowship, by the use of film as a medium for inner city communities to tell their stories. She helped to raise financing (as Executive Producer) for the film adaptation of the book, Half of a Yellow Sun, scheduled for release later this year. Written by the prize-winning Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the book tells the story of the effect of the Nigerian-Biafran War (1967-1970) on the lives of the 4 principal characters.
Yewande Sadiku remains fiercely ambitious even with a sterling career spanning almost 20 years in banking. She loves her job and manages to combine the high pressure world of investment banking with her role as a wife and mother of 2 young children. She is a stellar example of the quality of opportunities available to women at Stanbic IBTC.
Yewande’s track record at work has seen us win many awards, including a Euromoney Excellence Award for being the Best Investment Bank in Nigeria in 2010. If that was all she did, she would be really good, but Yewande is phenomenal.
She is very passionate about film finance and the economic potential of Nollywood. In her spare time, she is involved with financing projects in the Nigerian media and entertainment industry. She is an Executive Producer of the film adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun; she helped raise more than 70% of the budget for the Film. The film cast includes leading international stars Thandie Newton (Crash, The Pursuit of Happyness) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (2012, Salt) and leading Nigerian stars Onyeka Onwenu and Genevieve Nnaji. It was filmed in Calabar in May/June 2012 and is scheduled for release at the end of this year.
Yewande says that “the Bank truly offers excellent opportunities to women; at a certain stage in their lives, women need to work differently but not necessarily be less productive. I believe a woman can eat her cake and have it, but she must be excellent as multi tasking, a quality that many women naturally have. She can eat a portion and have the rest.”
At Stanbic IBTC, women can have all the cake they want. Happy International Women’s Day!
