FINTAK HALL OF FAME: The Shujaas who put Kenya’s money on its phones.

In late 2005 some of the businesses in a small M-PESA pilot in Nairobi and Thika found a use for their phones that nobody had designed. The banks closed before the agent shops did. At the end of the day they paid their takings into the service and left the money there overnight, using a mobile network as a safe.

No Kenyan statute covered the arrangement. Parliament passed a payments law in 2011, and it took effect in 2014. The pilot had been built for borrowers of the microlender Faulu Kenya to collect and repay small loans by phone. Its designers recorded what customers did instead. Traders paid each other. Families sent airtime to relatives upcountry. Businesses kept cash overnight.

Mashujaa Day honours people who fought for Kenya. The first cohort of FINTAK’s Hall of Fame won its place mostly through decisions to allow, fund or join a payment system that operated for seven years without a statute. A central bank sent a letter instead of a rulebook. A minister ordered an audit instead of a freeze. A chief executive pressed on over his shareholders’ objections. A bank took a telecoms licence so that it would not depend on a rival’s network.

FINTAK honours them today for laying the foundations, directly or indirectly, of the industry its members now work in.

The officials who said yes.

Stephen Mwaura Nduati headed the Central Bank of Kenya’s National Payment System division for more than a decade. In January 2007 the bank’s lawyers concluded that the service Safaricom wanted to launch was not banking business. In February the bank issued a letter of no objection, and Nduati’s division brought M-PESA inside the national payment system. “Ten days after receiving this letter, we launched,” the service’s designers wrote later that year. Business Daily called the integration the highlight of his career when he retired in 2017. He now chairs the Fintech Institute in Nairobi. In this Hall he is the godfather of mobile money.

Prof. Njuguna Ndung’u became governor in March 2007, within weeks of the launch. “I found a very hostile central bank telling me not to talk to those people,” he recalled in July 2026. He backed the service anyway, under an approach he called test and learn, adopted, he said in 2018, so as not to stifle innovation. His bank audited and cleared M-PESA, wrote the agent banking rules that took effect on 1 May 2010, and laid the ground for the National Payment System Act of 2011.

John Michuki answered the banks’ attempt to stop it with an audit. In December 2008 the banks asked the Central Bank to freeze the financial activities of the mobile operators. Michuki, then acting finance minister and better known for the Michuki rules on matatus, ordered the Central Bank to review the service instead. “I don’t know whether M-Pesa will end up well,” he told reporters. In January 2009 the Treasury said the audit had found the service “safe and reliable”.

Mwai Kibaki was president when M-PESA launched in 2007. In June 2009 he stood at Fort Jesus in Mombasa to launch TEAMS, the undersea fibre cable his government co-owned, and spoke of training “the first generation of truly digital Kenyans”. In December 2011 he signed the National Payment System Act, which brought payment providers under Central Bank supervision. His Vision 2030 plan, launched in June 2008, named financial services as a priority sector.

Prof. Bitange Ndemo worked with Minister Mutahi Kagwe on TEAMS as permanent secretary for information and communication from 2005 to 2013. The cable landed in June 2009 and helped end Kenya’s dependence on costly satellite links. Internet payment services that followed, from banking apps to Pesapal’s gateway, depended on the cheaper bandwidth that TEAMS and the cables after it brought. In July 2011 Ndemo led the launch of Kenya Open Data, and in 2018 he chaired the government taskforce on blockchain and artificial intelligence.

Dr Patrick Njoroge brought banks and mobile operators together as Covid-19 reached Kenya in March 2020. Person-to-person transfers under KSh 1,000 became free and transaction limits rose. “More than 1.6 million additional customers are now using mobile money channels,” he said that June. In March 2022 his Central Bank brought digital lenders, until then unregulated, under licensing. He also introduced the Banking Sector Charter after a run of bank failures.

The executives who built it.

Michael Joseph became Safaricom’s founding chief executive in 2000, when it had fewer than 18,000 subscribers. It had more than 17 million when he stepped down in 2010. Vodafone’s shareholders, he recalled in March 2025, told him M-PESA was a stupid idea and a waste of money. “But I said, ‘I’m going to do it anyway.’” Dare Okoudjou, chief executive of MFS Africa, called him “the father of mobile money” when Joseph joined the company’s board.

Nick Hughes started the M-PESA project at Vodafone in 2003, with matched funding from a UK government challenge fund. Susie Lonie, a mobile commerce specialist, came to Kenya to design it in detail and deliver it, from the October 2005 pilot to the national launch. They shared The Economist’s award for social and economic innovation in 2010. “I would never have predicted anything like the growth we experienced,” Lonie told How We Made It in Africa. Hughes went on to co-found M-KOPA. Neither is Kenyan, and both are honorary inductees.

Bob Collymore became Safaricom’s chief executive in November 2010. Over the next nine years M-PESA moved from sending money to storing and lending it. M-Shwari brought savings and small loans to the phone in 2012, Lipa na M-PESA took payments to the shop counter, and the Fuliza overdraft followed in January 2019. He received the Moran of the Burning Spear in 2012. The late Collymore, born in Guyana, became a Kenyan citizen and died at home in Nairobi in July 2019.

Sitoyo Lopokoiyit ran the non-fuel side of Chevron’s service stations when M-PESA’s team looked at forecourts as cash points. His advice helped shape the agent aggregator model that Safaricom described in February 2026 as “widely used in mobile money globally”. He joined Safaricom in 2011 to run M-PESA strategy, led M-commerce at Vodacom Tanzania from 2015, and from 2021 ran M-PESA Africa, which grew to eight countries and more than 60 million customers. In April 2026 he became chief executive of personal and private banking at Absa Group.

The bankers who joined the road.

Dr James Mwangi joined Equity Building Society in 1991, two years before the Central Bank came close to shutting it down. He became chief executive in 2004 and rebuilt it around customers other banks turned away. From 2010 Equity used agents to take banking to shop counters, and it had 6,892 agent outlets by March 2013. Equity launched its Wings to Fly scholarships under him in 2010, and he was named EY World Entrepreneur of the Year in 2012.

Isaac Awuondo led Commercial Bank of Africa when it launched M-Shwari with Safaricom on 27 November 2012. Customers could open an interest-bearing account from the M-PESA menu, with no forms and no branch visit, save from KSh 1 and borrow between KSh 100 and KSh 20,000 for 30 days. CBA held the deposits and carried the lending risk, scoring borrowers on their M-PESA history. Within about a year the service had more than five million customers. Michael Joseph, then at Vodafone, said at the launch that “saving is no longer the privilege of an elite”.

John Staley helped Equity win a mobile operator licence in April 2014, as its director of finance, technology and innovation. The bank put thin SIM cards on Airtel’s network so that it controlled the encryption keys and banking menu on its customers’ phones. In June 2014 he and the consultant Ignacio Mas wrote that without those keys a bank could not guarantee transaction security, and that the dominant operator set the price of the USSD sessions banks depended on. The telecoms business, they wrote, only needed to break even. Staley, who is South African, is an honorary inductee.

The founders who built their own rails.

Ken Njoroge co-founded Cellulant in Kenya in 2004 with Bolaji Akinboro. It began selling ringtones and dropped the business when mobile operators kept 80 per cent of the proceeds. It turned to payments, building mobile banking for African banks and, from 2012, the e-wallet that carried Nigeria’s fertiliser subsidies to millions of farmers. By the time he stepped down as chief executive in 2021, Cellulant served 12 markets.

Agosta Liko wrote his own payment gateway after his travel business lost its payment accounts. He had built that business after the 2007 election violence and the global financial crisis. Pesapal processed three transactions in its first year. It now operates in five countries. In October 2026 its card machines began taking M-PESA Tap to Pay and Scan to Pay, which Liko called “the biggest leap in Kenya’s checkout experience in years”.

The system they left behind.

In 2025 Kenyans sent each other KSh 8.66tn by mobile money, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. The economy produced KSh 17.6tn that year, so person-to-person transfers were equivalent to about half of GDP. The bureau counted 51.4 million mobile money subscriptions. Formal financial inclusion rose from 26 per cent of adults in 2006 to 84 per cent in 2021, on the FinAccess surveys. M-PESA earned Safaricom KSh 182.7bn in the year to March 2026.

M-PESA launched nine years before India’s Unified Payments Interface and 13 years before Brazil’s Pix. Both of those are public rails, run by a body owned by the banks in India and by the central bank in Brazil. Kenya’s rails were built privately and regulated afterwards. Building them required a company prepared to carry the commercial risk and officials prepared to let it operate without a statute, which is why six of the 16 inductees are public officials.

The bargain they struck.

The state is now renegotiating the terms. In June the Finance Act 2026 made digital payment services subject to VAT at 16 percent, leaving person-to-person transfers exempt. The same month Vodacom completed the share purchases, including 15 percent sold by the government, that gave it about 55 percent of Safaricom. In September the Central Bank published a draft payments law that would let it inspect payment firms without notice, appoint statutory managers and limit how trust funds are concentrated.

The trust that holds M-PESA balances is the formal version of the overnight safe the pilot’s businesses improvised in 2005. Customers’ money sits in trust at commercial banks, and the income from it has gone to a charitable foundation. When Vodafone sold the trust operator in September 2023, customers were owed about KSh 171bn, according to its filings. On 28 September Patrick Njoroge called the charity rule “a holdover from the industry’s nascent phase” and argued that customers should earn interest on their wallets.

The first cohort built a national payment system on permission granted before the law existed. The next will be judged on the rules that replace that permission, on who shares the rails, who earns on the float and how the lending is policed.

FINTAK recognises that many more Kenyans deserve a place in this Hall of Fame. This is a first cohort, not a complete list, and we will keep adding to it.

Published by the Fintech Association of Kenya.