Equity Bank marks a new milestone with Sh1 trillion deposits

By Monica MUEMA

Equity Bank’s depositors have saved over Sh1 trillion with the lender, making the financial institution the first one in the East Africa to cross this mark, coming just hours before the bank releases its Q3 results.

By end of June 2022, Equity’s customer deposits were valued at Sh970.9 billion, just Sh29.1 billion shy of the Sh1 trillion mark.

KCB Bank, which released its results last week, had deposits of Sh922.3 billion by end of September 2022 while the third placed bank, Co-op Bank had Sh432 billion.

As at December 2019, Equity Bank Group customers grew from 14 million customers to over 17.8 million customers while the banking industry for instance lost four million customers.

The balance sheet within the same period grew from Sh673billion to over Sh1.3 trillion by June, 30 2022 a growth of 100 per cent.
Share capital has grown from Sh111 billion to over Sh17 billion by June 2022 making Equity the most capitalized bank in the region.

The lender reported Sh24.4 billion in after tax profit for the first six months of the year and is expected to announce the largest profit for the first nine months on Tuesday.

Meanwhile the Group has appointed Uganda subsidiary managing director Samuel Kirubi as the Group’s chief operations officer to help scale up the lenders’ processes and services through technology.

Kirubi is taking over from John Wilson who left the position in 2019. The move will see Kirubi leave the position of managing director at Equity Bank Uganda to head the Group operations at the head office in Nairobi.

“As Equity rolls outs its ambitious Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan with the aim of scaling its customer base to 100 million by 2025, this calls for the scaling up of our operations, footprint and distribution infrastructure driven by technologically driven digitization and virtualization of the bank,” Equity CEO James Mwangi said.

“The Board has expressed confidence in Kirubi’s capability, experience and deep knowledge of the transition culture in taking up this responsibility at a critical time of the bank’s growth and expansion.”

The Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan is Sh732.48 billion ($6 billion) private sector-focused stimulus package announced in March.

The programme is eying the region with funds that will be offered in form of blended financing of short-term overdrafts, medium-term loans and credit facilities that require long-term project and development financing.