Absa Bank Kenya Plc has recruited one of Africa’s most influential mobile-money executives in a move that signals a deeper strategic shift underway in the continent’s banking industry. Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, the managing director of M-PESA Africa, will join Absa in April as chief executive for personal and private banking, marking a decisive turn toward a telecom-style digital operating model.
Lopokoiyit leaves M-PESA after four years in which he helped transform the platform from a payments utility into a financial super app serving 37 million monthly users across multiple African markets. His appointment underscores a growing realization among banks: retail banking is no longer defined by branches, balance sheets and loan books alone, but by platforms, distribution and data.
At Safaricom Plc, Lopokoiyit played a central role in launching Fuliza, the overdraft facility that normalized small, short-term credit for millions of users. As head of M-PESA Africa from 2021, he oversaw the layering of savings, credit, remittances and investment products onto the wallet’s core payments infrastructure. Absa’s decision to install him at the helm of its personal and private banking unit suggests the lender is seeking more than incremental digital upgrades. It is attempting to import mobile-money DNA directly into its retail franchise.
Kenya’s banks have historically relied on deposit growth and lending margins to drive earnings. But mobile-money platforms, led by M-PESA, have steadily captured the customer interface, controlling daily transaction flows and accumulating valuable behavioural data. For millions of users, mobile wallets not bank apps are now the primary point of financial interaction.
That shift has left traditional lenders facing a strategic risk: becoming regulated balance-sheet providers while fintechs and telecom platforms own the customer relationship. Absa’s recruitment of Lopokoiyit represents a deliberate counter-move.
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Telecom operators think in terms of scale, user acquisition and layered monetisation. They optimise for frequency of engagement and ecosystem “stickiness” rather than product-by-product margins. Applied to retail banking, that mindset points toward app-first journeys, embedded credit, personalised pricing and cross-selling driven by transaction data.
The move reflects a broader convergence across African financial services. Fintech platforms are seeking cheaper funding and regulatory shelter, while banks are searching for digital agility and relevance. Absa appears to be betting that importing telecom leadership is faster and perhaps more effective than trying to engineer that transformation internally.
The Fuliza lesson
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One of Lopokoiyit’s most consequential legacies is Fuliza, introduced in 2019. By allowing M-PESA users to complete transactions even when balances were insufficient, Safaricom created a new category of always-on, high-frequency credit. The product scaled rapidly, reshaping borrowing behaviour and generating significant fee income.
For banks, the lesson was stark. Unsecured lending can be both scalable and profitable when underwritten using real-time transaction data rather than traditional collateral models. As head of personal and private banking, Lopokoiyit will oversee the segment where unsecured consumer credit, deposits and entry-level wealth products converge a core profit engine for lenders.
Retail customers provide stable funding, while mass-affluent clients offer higher-margin opportunities in savings, investments and insurance. If Absa successfully integrates data-driven underwriting and telecom-style distribution into this segment, it could materially boost fee income and loan growth, particularly among younger, digitally native customers.
The Kenyan hire follows a series of senior leadership moves by Absa across the region, including high-profile appointments in South Africa. Such recruitment patterns often signal a broader transformation agenda rather than routine succession planning.
For Absa Kenya, the timing is critical. Competition is intensifying as Equity Group Holdings Plc and KCB Group Plc invest heavily in digital channels, while Safaricom continues to deepen M-PESA’s financial-services footprint. With banking penetration already relatively high and mobile-money usage near universal, future growth is likely to come from monetising digital behaviour rather than onboarding new customers.
Under Lopokoiyit, M-PESA accelerated its push toward a super-app model, bundling payments, savings, credit and investments into a single interface. Absa’s retail unit may now pursue a similar blueprint breaking down product silos in favour of a unified digital ecosystem.
Whether a heavily regulated bank can fully replicate telecom-style agility remains uncertain. Legacy systems, credit risk and compliance will impose limits. But the message behind the hire is unmistakable: in Kenya’s retail banking battle, scale and data now matter as much as capital.
