Effect of Corporate Governance on Financial Performance of Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria

Effective supervision of financial institutions is premised on existence of sound corporate governance. Corporate governance refers to the extent to which companies are run in an open and honest manner. Despite the relative stability experienced by financial institutions post-consolidated era, the health of financial institutions in Nigeria today appears to have worsen due to the weak corporate governance. It is as a result of this, the study examine the effect of corporate governance on financial performance of deposit money banks in Nigeria. This study obtained secondary data from the annual report of deposit money banks quoted on the Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE) spanning from 2011 to 2018 with the use of purposive sampling technique. Panel regression technique was adopted to analyse data collected. The result showed that corporate governance has significant effects on financial performance of deposit money banks in Nigeria as indicated by the p-value of Wald x2 of (0.0000) with coefficient (10.92) at 5% significance level. When individual element of corporate governance is considered, CEO duality has no significance effect on ROA with coefficient 2.1903 and p-value 0.943 while management equity holding has significant effect on ROA as indicated by p-value of 0.0000 and coefficient 10.958 at 5% significant level. The study then concluded that corporate governance has significant effect on financial performance of selected banks in Nigeria. Therefore the study recommends that CEO duality should be discourage in the deposit money banks in Nigeria and mandates a three years cooling off period where this is the case. This will assist to minimize potential conflicts of interests.