Eric Muriuki has left NCBA Group, where he ran the LOOP digital banking business, to join Absa Group as Managing Executive for Pan-African Growth Strategy, Platforms and Digital Ventures.

According to his LinkedIn profile, he will start his new role at Absa this month and will be based in the Johannesburg area.

If you have used a Kenyan phone to borrow money, save, or finish a payment you could not quite afford, you have probably used something he helped build.

Eric Muriuki started at Citi in Kenya in 1999 as a Business Systems Manager and stayed almost five years. In 2004 he moved to Co-operative Bank of Kenya as a Business Change Manager, which he did until mid-2007.

Thereafter, he moved to NCBA Group where he worked for 19 years and 4 months, in three roles:

  • Programme Director, Enterprise Transformation – July 2007 to August 2012
  • General Manager, New Business Ventures – August 2012 to September 2019
  • Group Director, Digital Business and CEO of LOOP DFS – October 2019 until the move to Absa

NCBA in its current form only exists since 2019, when NIC Group and Commercial Bank of Africa merged. The earlier years of his career were spent at the legacy bank under the NCBA heading.

Muriuki helped design the trust-account structure that allowed Safaricom to issue electronic money through M-PESA with regulatory approval. This was important because Safaricom is a telecom company, not a bank.

The trust arrangement allowed customers’ money to be held and transferred legally, and became the foundation for mobile money in Kenya.

Later, while working on his MBA thesis, Muriuki’s work led to the birth of M-Shwari, a mobile savings and micro-loan product that does not require physical collateral.

He also engineered the launch of Fuliza, a mobile overdraft service. If you do not have enough money in your M-PESA account to complete a transaction, Fuliza covers the shortfall and you repay it later. It has since become one of Kenya’s most widely used credit products.

LOOP Digital Financial Services was NCBA’s neobank, a bank that operates mostly through an app. Muriuki ran it and pushed it into other markets in the region, which is the experience Absa seems to want for its own expansion across Africa.

His new title at Absa Group covers three things: growth strategy across Africa, platforms, and digital ventures. That is a wide remit, but it fits someone whose track record is building products that attract very large numbers of small customers rather than a small number of large ones.