Moniepoint Appoints Rose Muturi As Kenya CEO

Nigerian fintech unicorn, Moniepoint, has appointed Rose Muturi as the Chief Executive Officer for Kenya. As one of East Africa’s most experienced digital-banking operators, Muturi is fit to lead Moniepoint’s expansion into the country following its acquisition of a 78 percent stake in Sumac Microfinance.

She joins Moniepoint from Branch where she helped turn a digital lender into a regulated Kenyan bank through a microfinance acquisition, precisely the manoeuvre Moniepoint is now attempting with Sumac.

Confirming the appointment this week, the company was precise about the role’s design saying that she will drive the group’s strategic direction in the country. Her brief spans the full platform Moniepoint intends to build in Kenya: payments, banking, credit and business-management tools for small businesses.

What makes the appointment notable is the near-exact match between Muturi’s last job and her new one. She spent more than four years at Branch International, rising from East Africa managing director to chief executive of Branch Kenya. At Branch, she steered the digital lender’s transformation into a regulated neobank after its acquisition of Century Microfinance Bank, using the acquired licence to expand from lending into full banking services.

That is, move for move, the strategy Moniepoint is now executing following its acquisition of Sumac.

Muturi has also held senior roles across the breadth of Kenya’s credit and banking landscape, leading Tala’s East African expansion in digital lending, and serving at HF Group, TransUnion Kenya, Chase Bank and Standard Chartered. Her career has spanned the credit bureaus, banks and fintechs her new employer will now compete with and alongside. She is also an alumna of IESE Business School.

Moniepoint’s Kenyan foothold was hard-won. After a years-long search for a route into East Africa’s biggest economy, including an earlier unsuccessful attempt to acquire the payments firm Kopo Kopo, the company completed its purchase of 78 percent of Sumac in March, with approvals from the Competition Authority of Kenya and the Central Bank of Kenya. The logic was regulatory as much as commercial with Kenya having long restricted new banking licences, making a licensed deposit-taking institution the practical doorway into the market.

Sumac, founded more than two decades ago and led by chief executive John Njihia, is a tier-three lender with a Nairobi-centred branch network and an SME-focused book of roughly 17,000 clients, small in scale, but carrying the licence, customer relationships and local knowledge Moniepoint said it was buying.

The Sumac deal, Moniepoint’s first major acquisition on the continent, came alongside its purchase of Orda, a cloud-based restaurant software provider, extending the group’s point-of-sale and business-management stack.