Exceptional Amazons Driving Brands- Olufunmilola Aluko: Brand Architect Putting Inclusion At The Heart Of Corporate Excellence
In Nigeria’s financial service Industry, where legacy institutions have long operated within rigid, male-dominated structures, Olufunmilola ‘Funmie’ Aluko has spent more than two decades doing something quite radical: building brands that listen. As the Chief Brand and Marketing Officer at Union Bank and, simultaneously, its Head of Customer Experience, she has made the case, in hard commercial terms, that inclusion is not a concession; it is a competitive advantage.
For twenty-four years, she has moved across the full landscape of financial services, navigating roles in Customer Experience management, Contact Centres, Corporate Strategy, Brand Management, Product Management, Business Process Management, Agent Banking, International Operations, and Sales and Marketing. Each posting has sharpened her conviction that the gap between what organisations say and what their customers actually experience is not merely a communications problem. It is a values problem. And values, she insists, must be built into every word, every campaign, and every product design decision an institution makes.
Today, as one of the most senior women in brand leadership in Nigeria’s banking sector, Funmi Aluko stands out as a vibrant female marketing and communications leader reshaping growth and inclusion within the banking industry. It is a recognition she handles with characteristic clarity: proud, purposeful, and already thinking about what it means for the women who will come after her.
A Bank With A Story Worth Telling
Union Bank of Nigeria is one of the country’s oldest and most storied financial institutions, tracing its roots back over a century. In recent years, the Bank has undergone a significant strategic transformation, repositioning itself as a Simpler, Smarter Bank with a modern, customer-focused institution with sharper digital capabilities and a clearer social purpose. Central to this reinvention has been its communications architecture, the stories it tells, the promises it makes, and the degree to which its actual customer experiences are congruent with those promises.
Under the stewardship of its current management, Union Bank has invested meaningfully in Alpher, its women-focused banking proposition, designing products and programmes that respond to the actual financial lives of Nigerian women. The Bank has developed targeted engagement strategies for women entrepreneurs, created financial literacy platforms, and established community touchpoints, positioning itself as a genuine partner in women’s economic advancement rather than merely a vendor.
Union Bank’s inclusion efforts have also extended inward. Through weHub, policies, and other initiatives, the Bank has made deliberate investments in gender balance at leadership and middle-management levels, building structures that retain, promote, and sponsor female talent into roles of real authority. An internal employee network has grown steadily into what Aluko herself describes as something with genuine cultural weight, not a box-checking exercise, but a living community that changes how the institution thinks about talent and belonging.
Background Of a Brand Builder
Funmie Aluko grew up introverted and deeply curious, not about the world in a sweeping, restless way, but specifically about people. What makes them tick? What are they really saying when they speak? How can the right words, placed in the right order, shift how someone feels or what they believe? She did not have a name for that fascination as a child. She simply knew that words provide leverage, and that stories could do things that arguments could not.
That early instinct eventually found its professional expression. Funmie holds a first degree in English from Lagos State University and an MBA from the Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick, UK; this academic combination equips her to understand both the texture of language and the architecture of strategy. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), a professional member of the global Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), and a Council Member of the CXPA Africa Regional Council. She is also a certified Experience Management Professional (XMP) with Qualtrics Institute, a Registered Practitioner with the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria, and a member of the American Marketing Association. In 2022, she was named a global top-20 finalist in the CX Leader of the Year award by MyCustomer.com, an international affirmation of her standing as a practitioner of uncommon rigour.
Her dual mandate at Union Bank, as both Chief Brand and Marketing Officer and Head of Customer Experience, is not accidental. It reflects a philosophy she has held and defended throughout her career: that the brand’s promises and the experiences delivered cannot contradict each other. When they do, trust erodes. And in a sector where trust is the only product that truly matters, that erosion is existential. By holding both roles simultaneously, she ensures that what Union Bank says to the world is anchored to what the Bank actually delivers to its customers. That is not a minor thing. It is the structural integrity of the institution’s reputation.
Clear Gains Of Inclusion
Ask Funmie Aluko about the business case for investing in women, and she will not reach for sentiment. She will reach for evidence. Organisations that invest seriously in women, not as a gesture but as a strategic commitment, consistently outperform those that do not. She has watched this play out at close range for more than two decades. “When women are included in decision-making, customer communications become more empathetic, product design becomes more human, and brand narratives become more honest”, she stated.
This is not, she notes, a coincidence. Women tend to ask different questions, notice different gaps, and insist on different standards of care. That rigour, applied consistently, produces better outcomes. The most compelling women-focused banking propositions she has seen are not built on assumptions. They are built on listening to real women, with real financial lives that did not always fit the default templates the industry was designed around. The result is communication that speaks to women as whole people, not as a niche. And that kind of intentionality, she argues, is precisely what turns inclusion into a competitive advantage.
The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day, ‘Give-to-Gain,’ also underlines the relevance of inclusion. The goal is to nurture and develop women, maximising the opportunities they see so they become the best versions of themselves.
Aluko is equally unsparing about the barriers women face in the industry. Three stand out in her analysis. The first is what she calls the credibility tax: women in senior communications roles often have to prove their strategic value in ways their male counterparts do not. The assumption that marketing is ‘soft’ work is compounded when the person leading it is a woman. The dismantling of this barrier, she believes, begins with organisations reframing what they value. Brand equity, customer trust, and reputation are balance-sheet items. The leaders who manage them deserve a seat at the strategy table, not just an invitation to present.
The second barrier is the visibility gap, women doing extraordinary work that does not get recognised or amplified as it should. The third is what she terms the confidence infrastructure problem: many women have been socialised to wait until they are one hundred per cent ready before stepping forward. That threshold, she says plainly, is a myth. Dismantling it requires honest mentorship that normalises imperfection and sponsors women into stretch opportunities before they feel ready.
Giving Access, Not Just Advice
What distinguishes Funmie Aluko as a leader is not only what she has built, but how she has brought others along. In her words, “There is a difference between telling someone they are capable and actually backing them with your credibility”. Aluko is deliberate about a distinction that many senior professionals miss: the difference between mentoring and sponsoring. Mentoring tells someone they are capable. Sponsoring backs them with your credibility, names them in rooms they have not yet entered, and creates the structural conditions for their advancement.
She tries, she says, to make the invisible visible. A lot of what holds women back in financial services is not a lack of talent. It is a lack of access to information, to rooms, to the right framing for their own ambitions. She names things plainly in conversations that could otherwise leave someone guessing. She sponsors where she can, and when she sees an opportunity for a colleague, not just when it is convenient.
The women who shaped her most, she reflects, were not always the ones with the most authority. Some were peers. Some were junior to her. What they offered was honest feedback at moments when the easier thing would have been silence. This quiet observation stayed with her far longer than any formal performance review. Women who tell you the truth when the truth is uncomfortable, she notes, are rare and worth protecting. She has tried to become that person for others, because she knows what it costs them to speak, and what it gives.
Clarity Before Cleverness
Funmie Aluko’s philosophy of brand communication can be distilled into four words: clarity before cleverness, always. In branding, it is tempting to reach for the striking phrase, the unexpected angle, the creative flourish. Those things have their places. But connection happens when a person reads something and thinks, ‘they understood me.’ That recognition of their need, their concern, their life is what creates trust. Her approach is to start from the customer’s reality, not from what the brand wants them to feel. When you do that honestly, the emotion follows. You do not have to manufacture it.
In discussing the tension between innovation and consistency, she draws on a metaphor she often returns to. She thinks of a brand not as a template but as a voice. A voice can be warm in one moment and authoritative in the next without losing its own character, because it has a consistent character underneath. Innovation, for her, is not about changing who a brand is. It is about finding new ways to be recognisable themselves. When a new format or idea is in front of her, the test is simple: Does this sound like us? Does it serve the person receiving it? If the answer to both is yes, she will push it as far as it can go. If it sacrifices clarity for novelty, she sets it aside.
Defining Achievements
It would be easy, she acknowledges, to point to a campaign or a product launch. And there have been moments she is proud of: work that has pushed alpher, Union Bank’s women-focused banking proposition, forward; programmes designed to shift how inclusion is experienced rather than just announced; and weHub, the Bank’s female employee network that has grown into something with genuine cultural weight.
But what she considers most defining is something less visible. When she took on her dual mandate, she inherited a remit that required not just creativity but architecture, clear roles, measurable outcomes, codified processes, and a team culture that could sustain itself even under pressure. That work is never finished. But it is the foundation on which everything else stands.
The achievement she is most proud of, she says without hesitation, is that the people she leads know what they are working towards, why it matters, and that they are not alone in it. That kind of clarity does not happen by accident. It is deliberately built every single day. In a sector where talent is abundant but vision is rare, that clarity is a gift to her team, to the institution, and to the industry.