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.
His LinkedIn profile says he starts at Absa this month and will work from the Johannesburg area.
Anyone in Kenya who has borrowed, saved or covered a payment from a phone has probably used a product he helped build.
Two decades in Kenyan banking
Muriuki joined 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, a post he held until mid 2007.
He then joined Commercial Bank of Africa, which became NCBA Group after it merged with NIC Group in 2019. He spent more than 19 years there in three roles:
- Programme Director, Enterprise Transformation, from July 2007 to August 2012
- General Manager, New Business Ventures, from August 2012 to September 2019
- Group Director, Digital Business and CEO of LOOP DFS, from October 2019 until the move to Absa
The products behind M-Pesa lending and savings
Muriuki says he took part in structuring the trust account model that let Safaricom issue electronic money through M-Pesa with regulatory approval. Safaricom is a telecom company, not a bank, so the structure let regulators approve the holding and transfer of customer funds.
He also says an idea from his MBA thesis became M-Shwari, the savings and loan service NCBA and Safaricom launched in 2012. It lends without physical collateral.
He then worked on Fuliza, the overdraft that covers the shortfall when an M-Pesa balance falls short of a payment. Customers repay it later. NCBA, Safaricom and KCB Group launched it in 2019.
The scale is large. Kenyans borrowed Sh1.24 trillion through Fuliza in 2025, 37.8 percent more than the Sh906 billion of 2024. Fuliza and M-Shwari together supplied 31.9 percent of NCBA’s pre tax profit.
Taking LOOP beyond Kenya
LOOP DFS is NCBA’s digital bank, which runs mostly through a phone app. Muriuki widened it from a Kenyan product into a platform for other markets. NCBA now runs digital businesses in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ivory Coast and Ghana.
His new title at Absa covers growth strategy across Africa, platforms and digital ventures. His record is in products that serve very large numbers of small customers. Absa launched Absa Next, a digital wallet open to non-customers, in Kenya last month.
In his own words
Muriuki described his approach in a post announcing the move. “I build the platforms and financial rails that let African institutions grow faster than their balance sheets alone would allow,” he said.
He argues that technology is rarely the main obstacle in African financial services. “It is trust, sequencing and regulatory design, done correctly and in the right order,” he said. “Platforms win by compounding trust faster than anyone else.”
He said M-Shwari “reached 1 million accounts in under six weeks” and now “hosts 78 million users across six markets.” He described Fuliza as “Kenya’s most used digital overdraft.”
At LOOP, he said, he “re-architected a single market digital bank into Pan African infrastructure: two regulated entities, six markets, and platform as a service pipelines into DRC, Ethiopia and Nigeria.”
He lists five principles:
- Infrastructure before interface
- Platform economics over single market product thinking
- Regulator aligned innovation
- AI first operating discipline
- Playing the long game
At Absa, he said, the work means “integrating strategic digital capabilities into the core franchises, and building the partnership, open finance and venture structures that extend them across the continent.”
Muriuki holds a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science from JKUAT and an MBA in Strategic Management from Strathmore Business School. He has also completed executive programmes at Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, and Harvard Business School.
The platform he helped open keeps growing. Safaricom has since added investments to M-Pesa, as it did when it entered the money market fund business and when it launched Ziidi.
