When Kenya pioneered mobile-money in 2007, Sitoyo Lopokoiyit sat next to Safaricom’s founding chief executive Michael Joseph at the launch of M-Pesa. At the time, he wasn’t even an employee of the telecom’s operator.
Today, Mr Sitoyo’s name is synonymous with mobile money, which explains why the Johannesburg-based Absa picked him as its new chief executive for personal and private banking.
Mr Sitoyo’s rise to the top starts from humble beginnings and captures resilience, passion and a bit of luck including being in the right spaces at the right time.
His humble background, having grown up in the Pokot region, combined with an inquisitive mind in school, saw him join the prestigious Alliance High School before proceeding to the University of Nairobi (UoN) where he studied commerce.
Opportunity would subsequently call right out of the gates of the UoN, as retailer Uchumi handed him a branch manager post as an intern, allowing him to hone his business and leadership skills in his early years.
‘I think that’s one of the best jobs I’ve had in terms of having full responsibility. I became like the CEO of the branch which served as a great training ground from a retail perspective,’ he says.
Despite working in corporate for his entire career, Mr Sitoyo maintains that he has always been an entrepreneur at heart, using his time in university to test out his business acumen.
‘I have been an entrepreneur all my life. I have innovated, started companies and sold companies from the time I was 18. I have had a garbage collection company, pool tables and so on.’
Mr Sitoyo’s next posting at Chevron, which operated the Caltex branded service stations in Kenya in the early 2000s, perhaps brought him closer to the role he fulfils today.
Having been tasked with running the non-fuel arm of the business, Mr Sitoyo was forced to look at the service station as a larger retail destination beyond a re-fuelling point and helped integrate services like ATMs and restaurants creating the service stations we know today.
When a then young Safaricom business begun exploring the scope for a mobile-money business, they contacted Mr Sitoyo as they eyed the service stations as important cash-in and cash-out points and used the learnings from the engagement to create an aggregator model for M-Pesa as it’s known today.
Mr Sitoyo sat next to Safaricom’s founding CEO at the launch of M-Pesa without ever guessing that he would soon head the platform’s strategy and business development and later become the managing director of M-Pesa Africa.
‘In March 2007, I was sitting next to Michael Joseph watching as M-Pesa was launched in Kenya. A few years later, I came in to run M-Pesa as the head of strategy and business development then my career grew inside the company to the point where I headed M-Pesa Africa.’
Having disrupted the traditional payment space including commercial banks, Mr Sitoyo has now taken up the challenge furthering the disruption from the inside.
In April this year, the Johannesburg headquartered Absa Group picked him as its new CEO for personal and private banking.
The lender is betting on his prior experience to deliver integrated and customer centric solutions across its personal and private banking franchise, while also exploring new growth opportunities.
While he can be viewed as the antithesis of traditional finance, having pioneered and scaled mobile money payments, Mr Sitoyo admits that he has a long-held admiration for banks.
‘The reason why we were disrupting banks in my previous role is because we admired what they had. They can have a savings solution, a wealth solution, an international money transfer, mortgages and asset financing all at the same time and that’s what our customers wanted.’
After nearly two decades leading innovation in mobile money, Mr Sitoyo is perhaps the most known face of a transition where fintech talent is joining traditional financial institutions like banks.
From his point of view, it isn’t much of a talent war but a drive to recruit the best people who can reach an ever-evolving customer base.
‘I think what you are seeing with talent moving across industries is more about how the customer is changing. Mobile network operators (MNOs) are playing in financial services; banks are becoming MNOs in certain places.
The disruption is moving at such a fast pace that you are even seeing supermarkets become banks. So as for the competition, you don’t know where it’s coming from.’
At Absa, Mr Sitoyo is expected to lead the Group charges across its 12 African markets, including Kenya, where the bank is seeking to leverage its key customer data and touchpoints to offer its services portfolio including wealth management, advisory, asset management and custody.
To meet the expectations of his new role, Mr Sitoyo is expected to take on differences where various markets are at varying levels of integration while also remaining cognisant of always-changing customer dynamics and technology.
Ultimately, however, Mr Sitoyo believes that banks who will thrive from the rest of the pack are those who best understand their customers.
‘The person who starts understanding the customer better will become much more valuable in this financial services sector.’