Eric Muriuki is leaving NCBA to join Absa Group as Managing Executive for Pan-African Growth Strategy, Platforms and Digital Ventures. Absa Group is the Johannesburg-based parent of Absa Bank Kenya. At NCBA, Muriuki is Group Director, Digital Business and CEO of LOOP DFS, the company behind LOOP, the bank’s app for younger and salaried customers. His LinkedIn profile says he starts at Absa this month and will be based in the Johannesburg area. Neither NCBA nor Absa has announced the move, and NCBA has not said who will run LOOP DFS.

He joined Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) in July 2007. CBA merged with NIC Group in 2019 to form NCBA, so the 19 years are mostly spent at the bank NCBA grew out of. Before CBA he worked at Citi and at Co-operative Bank of Kenya.

  1. M-Shwari: It launched in 2012, when the bank was still CBA. LOOP’s own biography of Muriuki says he pioneered it, and its rollout to Tanzania as M-Pawa and to Uganda, Rwanda and Ivory Coast as MoKash.
  2. Fuliza: Built by Safaricom together with KCB and CBA (Now NCBA).

The digital business is now a large part of NCBA’s earnings. Fuliza, which NCBA runs with Safaricom and KCB, disbursed KES 1.25 trillion in 2025, up about 38% from KES 906 billion in 2024, NCBA’s results deck shows. Disbursed means the total lent out over the year, so a customer who borrows and repays ten times is counted ten times. NCBA says its digital business supplied 32% of group profit before tax in 2025, or KES 9.0 billion.

Muriuki also says he had a hand in how M-Pesa holds customers’ money. The shillings behind your M-Pesa balance sit in a trust account at a bank, outside Safaricom’s own books. In a podcast he says CBA’s contribution was “designing and putting in place the model” that let electronic money launch with the regulator’s comfort. A 2017 paper from Oxford tells it differently: legal experts at the Central Bank of Kenya developed the trust account under trust law, with the money held at CBA. The credit looks shared, and we can’t say how much of it is his.

NCBA is also getting a new owner. Nedbank, a South African bank, is buying a 66% stake for ZAR 13.9 billion, or about KES 110 billion, paid 20% in cash and 80% in Nedbank shares. The notice lists NCBA’s digital capabilities and its KES 1 trillion a year in digital loans among the reasons. The Central Bank of Kenya approved the deal on 28th August 2026, and Nedbank said the remaining approvals were due towards the end of the third quarter. It has not announced the deal as complete. We covered the offer in January. Muriuki’s move comes in the middle of that handover.

In February Absa named Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, then Managing Director of M-Pesa Africa at Safaricom, Chief Executive of Personal and Private Banking from 1st April 2026. Absa’s announcement credits him with driving the launch of Fuliza, and he explained it for Safaricom in 2019. So Absa now has the Safaricom executive who launched Fuliza and the NCBA executive credited as its co-creator.

On 25th September Absa launched Absa Next, an app for saving, investing and borrowing that doesn’t need an Absa account, and said it would use the app as the template for digital banking in other Absa markets. It didn’t name the markets or give dates. We covered the launch, and Lopokoiyit spoke at it. Muriuki’s title names no markets or products, but next to that plan it reads like the job of taking something like Absa Next, or a lending partnership with a telco like the ones he built, into other countries. That is our thinking. Absa hasn’t said so.

If you use Fuliza or M-Shwari, nothing changes, because Safaricom, NCBA and KCB run the products and not one executive. Fuliza had 33.4 million users at the end of 2024. The things to watch are who takes over LOOP DFS, when Nedbank closes its purchase, and what Absa says the new role covers and in which countries.