Which products should your institution stop selling?
The world's biggest banks have spent a decade shrinking to grow, exiting whole countries to concentrate capital. The same surgery, done at product level, is where most African banks flinch, because killing a product cleanly is harder accounting than launching one.
Precursor illustration
Walk through the product catalogue of any mid-sized East African commercial bank and you will find a museum of past chief executives' pet projects: dormant youth savings accounts with bespoke debit card designs, diaspora mortgage variants with twelve active borrowers, legacy trade-finance portals running on unsupported servers, cobranded merchant wallets launched for a 2019 press release. Every bank claims it wants to simplify. Almost no executive team pulls the plug cleanly, because stopping new sales on a glossy brochure takes an afternoon, while retiring the live accounts, standing orders, regulatory reporting feeds and shared overhead underneath requires surgical management accounting.
The global banks have been running this surgery in public for a decade. In April 2022, Standard Chartered announced a strategic withdrawal from seven markets across Africa and the Middle East, Angola, Cameroon, The Gambia, Jordan, Lebanon, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe, while exiting retail and wealth banking in Tanzania and Côte d'Ivoire to concentrate capital where it held scale. Executing those divestitures through 2026 required complex regulatory approvals, buyer migrations to regional groups and painstaking balance-sheet disentanglement. What holds for a multinational exiting a country holds twice over for a domestic bank killing an underperforming product line: cutting the revenue without removing the underlying cost structure makes the institution poorer, not simpler.
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The Precursor Editorial Team
Precursor is published by the FinTech Association of Kenya and exercises independent editorial judgement under the Editorial Independence Charter. This article is labelled Practitioner view: no commercial party reviewed it before publication.
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