Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, the man who reimagined M-PESA, leaves for Absa Bank

When Sitoyo Lopokoiyit confirmed to on Tuesday night that he would leave his role as Managing Director of M-PESA Africa at the end of March 2026, it closed a chapter that has reshaped how money moves across Kenya and increasingly across seven other African markets.

Safaricom or Vodacom is yet to make a formal statement and announce Sitoyo’s successor. Absa Bank Kenya, the country’s fifth-biggest bank, announced on Wednesday that the executive who spent the last five years building one of Africa’s most powerful fintech platforms will be joining as Chief Executive for Personal and Private Banking, effective April 1, 2026.

Yet few exits in Kenya’s corporate world carry as much weight.

Since taking the helm in 2021, Sitoyo has presided over M-PESA’s evolution into what is increasingly a financial super app, embedding savings, credit, merchant services, international remittances, and now even stock trading into the daily economic lives of more than 37 million monthly active users.

His departure also comes at a delicate moment for M-PESA, a platform now so deeply wired into Kenya’s economy that even short outages trigger alarm bells, revealing both its scale and the systemic risks that accompany its dominance.

Building an economic engine

When Sitoyo assumed leadership of M-PESA Africa—the joint venture between Safaricom and Vodacom created to centralise product development and expand the platform across the continent—M-PESA was already one of the most successful fintech products ever built, with more than 30 million users in Kenya alone.

Launched in 2007 as a simple mobile wallet for sending money via USSD, it had grown into the backbone of Kenya’s peer-to-peer and retail payments, and a critical financial platform in Tanzania, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But by the late 2010s, critics increasingly described it as a powerful but narrow utility, exceptional at moving money, slower at evolving into a broader digital finance platform.

Sitoyo’s mandate was to change that.

Under his leadership, M-PESA pivoted decisively toward a smartphone-first ecosystem. The launch of the M-PESA Super App in 2021, developed in partnership with China’s Alipay, opened the platform to third-party mini apps, allowing transport services, merchants, utilities, lenders, and government services to operate directly inside M-PESA.

The company doubled down on merchant payments through Pochi la Biashara and the M-PESA Business App, giving informal traders digital wallets, transaction histories, and cashflow visibility previously unavailable in the informal economy. It expanded globally through partnerships with PayPal, Western Union, and AliExpress, opening international commerce to local businesses and consumers.

This week, Ziidi Trader pushed M-PESA into capital markets, enabling users to buy and sell Nairobi Securities Exchange shares directly from their phones—a symbolic leap from mobile money into mass-market investing.

What emerged was not just a bigger payments company, but a closed financial ecosystem where money increasingly enters, circulates, and stays within the M-PESA platform.

A fintech brain built across industries

Sitoyo’s influence in digital finance was shaped far beyond telecoms.

His career spans more than 15 years across retail, oil and gas, and fintech, experiences that gave him a practical understanding of how money moves in everyday African economies.

Early roles at Uchumi Supermarkets, Chevron (Caltex), and Total Kenya exposed him to distribution networks and consumer behaviour long before mobile money became mainstream. It was during his time at Caltex in 2005 that he sketched one of M-PESA’s earliest growth ideas: using fuel stations as cash-in and cash-out agent points, a model that later became central to M-PESA’s national scale.

He joined Safaricom in 2011 as Head of M-PESA Strategy, before moving to Vodacom Tanzania in 2015 as Director of M-Commerce, where he earned a reputation as a turnaround specialist in a fiercely competitive mobile money market.

Returning to Safaricom in 2018 as Chief Financial Services Officer, Sitoyo oversaw some of the company’s most commercially significant innovations, including Fuliza, the world’s first mobile money overdraft product, which reached four million users within days of launch, and the expansion of M-Shwari into micro-savings and credit.

Those successes made him the natural choice to lead M-PESA Africa when the joint venture was formed.

From Pokot to the world stage

Industry perception of Sitoyo’s leadership has been overwhelmingly positive.

Peers routinely credit him with turning M-PESA into one of the most sophisticated digital finance platforms in emerging markets. In 2023, he was inducted into the 11:FS Digital Finance Hall of Fame, recognising his influence on global mobile money innovation. The Kenyan government awarded him both the Moran and, later, the Chief of the Order of the Burning Spear for advancing financial inclusion.

Lawyer Donald Kipkorir captured the emotional weight of his journey in an X post on Wednesday, describing Sitoyo’s rise from a Pokot boy in a village once associated with cattle rustling to one of Africa’s most powerful fintech executives as “the story of legends,” quoting Shakespeare as he wished him godspeed.

Yet M-PESA’s success has also sharpened scrutiny.

As the platform has expanded into credit, merchant payments, remittances, and wealth management, concerns have grown about market concentration, operational risk, and the economy’s dependence on a single private platform. Central bank officials increasingly frame M-PESA as critical national infrastructure, a status that brings more demanding expectations around resilience, oversight, and competition.

In that sense, Sitoyo’s legacy is both transformative and complex: he helped build a platform that powers everyday economic life, and in doing so made it too central to fail.

The next chapter at Absa

Sitoyo will not be stepping away from financial services.

Absa has announced its appointment as Chief Executive for Personal and Private Banking, effective April 1, 2026, placing him in charge of one of the bank’s most strategic growth engines as it pushes deeper into digital services, customer experience, and integrated financial products.

The bank said the move reflects its focus on customer-centric innovation and large-scale transformation, pointing to Sitoyo’s track record scaling M-PESA into a continental fintech powerhouse serving more than 56 million customers and over five million businesses.

Few corporate transitions will shape the future of digital finance in the region more than this one.