Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, the Managing Director of M-PESA Africa, will step down from his role at the end of March 2026, bringing to a close a five-year tenure that reshaped Africa’s most influential mobile money platform. He is set to join Absa Bank Kenya as Chief Executive for Personal and Private Banking, effective April 1, 2026.
Absa Bank confirmed the appointment on Wednesday, describing Lopokoiyit as a key addition to its executive leadership as the lender deepens its focus on digital banking, customer experience, and integrated financial services. Safaricom and Vodacom, joint owners of M-PESA Africa, are yet to officially announce his successor.
Since assuming leadership in 2021, Lopokoiyit has overseen M-PESA’s transition from a dominant payments service into a multi-layered digital financial ecosystem. Brandspur Banking News Desk reports that under his watch, the platform expanded aggressively into savings, credit, merchant services, international remittances, and, most recently, retail investing.
M-PESA now serves over 37 million monthly active users across multiple African markets, with features that allow users to save, borrow, pay merchants, send money across borders, and trade shares on the Nairobi Securities Exchange directly from their mobile phones. The introduction of the M-PESA Super App in partnership with Alipay marked a turning point, opening the platform to third-party services and mini-apps embedded within its ecosystem.
Lopokoiyit also drove merchant-focused innovations such as Pochi la Biashara and the M-PESA Business App, tools designed to integrate informal traders into the digital economy by providing transaction records, payment acceptance, and cashflow visibility. Strategic global partnerships with PayPal, Western Union, and AliExpress further positioned M-PESA as a gateway between local African businesses and international commerce.
His exit comes at a sensitive period for M-PESA, which has become deeply embedded in Kenya’s economic infrastructure. The platform’s scale means service disruptions now raise systemic concerns, while regulators continue to scrutinise its growing influence across payments, credit, and wealth management.
Lopokoiyit’s career spans retail, oil and gas, and telecommunications, with previous roles at Uchumi Supermarkets, Chevron, and Total Kenya before joining Safaricom in 2011. He later moved to Vodacom Tanzania, where he led mobile money operations, before returning to Safaricom to oversee major financial services innovations, including the launch of Fuliza, the mobile overdraft product.
His contributions have earned both local and international recognition, including induction into the 11:FS Digital Finance Hall of Fame and national honours from the Kenyan government for advancing financial inclusion.
At Absa, Lopokoiyit will take charge of one of the bank’s most critical business segments as it accelerates its digital transformation strategy. The bank said his experience scaling M-PESA into a continental fintech platform serving more than 56 million customers and millions of businesses aligns with its long-term growth ambitions.
The leadership transition marks one of the most closely watched executive moves in East Africa’s financial services sector, with implications for both mobile money innovation and the evolving relationship between fintech platforms and traditional banks.
