What Absa Group’s Hiring of M-PESA’s Sitoyo Lopokoiyit Reveals About Kenny Fihla’s Strategic Intentions Sitoyo Lopokoiyit’s arrival is not simply a headline recruitment — it is the clearest signal yet that Kenny Fihla’s Absa is moving from strategy to execution. After weeks of openly framing East Africa as a growth theatre defined by scale, deposits, retail relevance and inorganic expansion, Fihla is now reshaping the bank’s retail engine with fintech-grade leadership and platform logic. In hiring an M-PESA ecosystem architect to lead Personal and Private Banking, Absa is effectively declaring that the next phase of its retail battle will be won not through branch footprint alone, but through digital convergence, modernised architecture, and daily customer relevance in an intensifying deposit war.

Kenny Fihla’s bold tech-led retail reset sees him tap Sitoyo Lopokoiyit to power Absa’s next phase of reinvention.

Muhereza KyamuteteraFebruary 13, 2026February 13, 2026

Hardly two weeks after Absa Group CEO Kenny Fihla concluded a high-level working visit to Nairobi, Kenya, the Group this week announced that it had hired Sitoyo Lopokoiyit as its new Head of Personal and Private Banking — a move that reads less like a leadership reshuffle and more like a strategic declaration. During that Nairobi visit, Fihla was unusually direct about Absa’s intentions in Kenya and the wider East African corridor. In an interview with Business Daily, he confirmed the bank was actively exploring acquisition opportunities in Kenya, signalling a renewed appetite for inorganic growth and a determination to…

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