Rafiu Oyesola Salawu

Risks inherent in banking businesses should be managed to prevent financial losses to the sector’s stakeholders and negative externalities to the global economy. To this end, this study examines the effect of risk management on the performance of deposit money banks in Nigeria. A sample of eight (8) deposit money banks with international authorization are purposively selected out of 12 deposit money banks due to data availability. Panel data analysis techniques were adopted to analyze the secondary data that were obtained from the annual reports of banks. Findings based on the disaggregated model results reveal that both liquidity and capital risk variables exert a negative but insignificant effect on performance. However, credit risk drives performance of the internationally authorized banks positively and significantly. Furthermore, Management quality (MQ) is the only control variable that has a significant influence on the performance of the selected deposit money banks. The study concludes that credit risk and management quality significantly and positively drive performance among the financial entities.