How FSDH built its leadership pipeline with Kryptr
Products used: Talent Exceptionality™ Test · ELITE Management Accelerator
About the Company
FSDH Group is Nigeria's foremost financial services group. The company started as the country's first discount house and grew to become one of the first institutions granted a merchant banking licence in Nigeria.
Today the group operates across merchant banking, asset management, and securities, serving individuals, corporates, and institutional clients from its Lagos headquarters.
Talent sits at the centre of that story. FSDH describes its people as its most valuable asset and invests deliberately in a pipeline of emerging leaders to drive business growth and sustainability in the years ahead. FSDH is recognised as one of Nigeria's Great Places to Work, with 94% of its employees agreeing to that experience.
I'm impressed by the quality of thinking in the cohort's capstone presentation. It reflects the real competence they've built through the programme.
Toyin Owolabi — Managing Director/CEO, FSDH Asset Management
The Challenge
As FSDH continued to grow, the company hit a familiar inflection point after scaling past 200 people: it needed a fresh pipeline of capable managers to lead teams and drive the business forward.
There was a clear need for a bench of emerging leaders who understood the business, with both industry knowledge and leadership capability.
But building a leadership programme from scratch would mean pulling executives off their day jobs to design one, and buying an off-the-shelf course would miss everything that makes leading at FSDH specific.
The Solution
A ready-to-run accelerator, contextualised from day one.
What started as a screening problem became a full pipeline.
FSDH first used Kryptr's Talent Exceptionality™ Test to cut a pool of 750+ applicants down to a 50+ shortlist, with a clear recommendation on every profile: A-talent to engage, B-talent to consider where A-talent wasn't available, and candidates below the exceptionality baseline. That alone saved the HR team 60+ hours of assessment and screening.
But the bigger discovery was that Kryptr could run the whole pipeline from shortlist to placement on one system. Rather than build from a blank page, FSDH plugged in Kryptr's ELITE Management Accelerator: a structured, six-week, 38-module programme it could adopt and adapt instead of designing internally.
Highlights of Training Areas
And it was built for FSDH, not lifted from a template. Assessment questions were written directly on FSDH's business model, its subsidiary structure, and the realities of the Nigerian financial system its managers would operate in from day one. Simulations run in the same context.
The Fintech Capstone was framed by FSDH's own Head of Digital Strategy around a live business challenge, and on the final day, associates presented to a panel that included the MD.
The screening tool saved our team significant time and resources in shortlisting top candidates. We couldn't have built what Kryptr built in the time: they built it, and it wasn't just speed. The content was contextualised to FSDH from day one.
Olufunso Lotun — Human Resource, FSDH
The Results
New leaders trained. One reusable programme.
Screening got radically leaner.
The manual assessment, screening, and shortlisting that used to consume the HR team ran on the Talent Exceptionality™ Test instead — 750+ applicants narrowed to a 50+ shortlist, 60+ hours back on the team's calendar.
A full programme, delivered without building one.
A six-week, 38-module accelerator, contextualised to FSDH from day one, stood up with the depth of something built over months.
The programme now compounds.
The full 38-module curriculum, assessment architecture, and reporting infrastructure is reusable for Cohort 2 without rebuilding, dropping cost per associate significantly from the second cohort onward.
Common Questions
Frequently asked questions
FSDH built a full leadership pipeline in weeks, not months.
Your leadership bench could be next.
Screen faster, train sharper, and build a programme that compounds with every cohort.
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