Kenny Fihla Wants Absa to Stop Waiting for Permission.

The teller had left. The position was approved. Replacing the person should have been straightforward.

Instead, according to Kenny Fihla, an Absa branch manager could wait three months for head office to authorise the appointment. The remaining staff absorbed the work. Customers received a poorer service. A manager responsible for running a branch could not make a basic decision about staffing it.

“You can imagine how disempowered that manager must feel,” Fihla said in an interview reported by News24 in August.

For the man who took charge of Absa Group in June 2025, this was an expensive way to exercise authority. The bank had people capable of identifying a problem and money available to solve it. Its own procedures kept the two apart.

Fihla’s career has taken him through institutions where much more than a vacant position was at stake. He helped restructure a city struggling to pay for its ambitions, ran a business organisation fighting crime and entered banking without having spent his early working life in a bank. At Standard Bank, he rose to lead a corporate and investment banking division whose earnings doubled during his tenure.

Absa has hired that experience. It now needs him to make it useful far beyond his office.

Before the balance sheet.

Kennedy “Kenny” Fihla was born in Johannesburg and spent part of his childhood with his grandmother in Vrede, a small Free State town. He came from a large family. Sending younger children to their grandmother helped two working parents manage the household, he recalled in a 2017 interview with CFO South Africa.

His route into professional life passed through organised labour and engineering. Between 1988 and 1990, he served as a branch secretary of the Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers Union. He studied mechanical engineering at Harare Polytechnic and later earned an MSc in financial economics from the University of London and an MBA from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Engineering might have kept him occupied with physical infrastructure. Post-apartheid Johannesburg brought him into contact with the financial limits beneath it.

A democratic city had to extend services to people excluded for generations. Roads, housing and basic services carried expectations that could no longer be postponed on the grounds that the people needing them lived in the wrong neighbourhoods. But extending a service also meant finding the money to maintain it, collect its revenue and pay the people operating it.

Political legitimacy could authorise the work. It could not settle the bill.

From 1997 to 2000, Fihla chaired a ministerially established committee charged with turning around the Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council. He also chaired the Transformation Lekgotla implementing the city’s restructuring. His Financial and Fiscal Commission biography credits that work with helping restore the councils’ finances.

By March 1999, the pressure was public. Contemporary reporting by the Mail & Guardian recorded Fihla warning that the council employed 28,000 people and had another 20,000 vacant positions. Filling those vacancies, he said, would consume between half and three-fifths of the city’s budget.

For a former union official, restructuring could not be reduced to removing workers from a spreadsheet. Nor could protecting workers mean preserving an institution’s spending until it could no longer function. Residents needed services, employees needed a viable employer and the city needed creditors willing to trust it.

Fihla was learning to negotiate among people whose claims were legitimate but whose demands could not all be financed at once.

That experience would travel with him into banking. A branch needs enough staff to serve its customers. A city needs enough revenue to sustain its workforce. Cutting indiscriminately and requiring permission for everything can both leave an institution unable to do its job.

Learning the bank from the outside.

In 2003, Fihla became chief executive of Business Against Crime South Africa. The role placed him between public authorities and corporate leaders, before he joined Standard Bank in 2006.

His early assignment was Financial Asset Services, a business he later described as demoralised and generating R350 million in annual revenue. He set a three-year target of R500 million and gave the campaign a name, FAS 500. The operation subsequently became Investor Services. By 2017, he was describing a much larger business with close to half its South African market.

The target gave employees a task more useful than defending their place in the organisation. Reaching it required decisions about customers, services and the work that would bring in revenue.

An outsider can be useful in such circumstances. Specialists know which activities are difficult and why particular arrangements exist. Someone arriving from elsewhere can ask whether those arrangements still serve a purpose. The advantage lasts only if the newcomer listens closely enough to distinguish an unnecessary obstacle from a safeguard.

Two years after Fihla joined, the global financial crisis supplied a harsh education in that distinction. He has described it as accelerating his understanding of what could go wrong inside a bank.

Confidence can bring customers into a bank. Controls help ensure their money remains safe after it arrives. A leader trying to make decisions faster has to understand both.

Fihla went on to lead transactional services and client coverage, moving closer to the large companies whose payments, borrowing and investments sustain corporate banking. In 2017, he became chief executive of Standard Bank’s Corporate and Investment Banking division.

When his departure was announced in March 2025, Standard Bank credited his 2017–2024 stewardship with doubling the division’s headline earnings to R20.5 billion. Headline earnings are a profit measure used in South Africa that excludes specified capital items.

He had already become Standard Bank Group’s deputy chief executive and chief executive of its South African bank. Absa offered responsibility for an entire competing group. His appointment took effect on 17 June 2025, succeeding interim chief executive Charles Russon.

Nearly two decades of relationships would now sit across the competitive divide.

The cost of waiting.

At Absa, Fihla has described a culture in which decisions accumulated at the centre. In his account, the inability to replace a departing teller left employees overworked and customers frustrated.

A head office can count an unfilled position as a cost avoided. It is harder to count the business that never arrives because someone decides opening an account will take too long, or the customer who stops asking for a loan because each conversation produces another referral.

Those losses rarely arrive neatly labelled as bureaucracy.

Giving managers more discretion changes the bargain. They must know what they can approve, what they must escalate and what results they will be held responsible for. The centre still needs reliable information and the ability to intervene. Otherwise, decentralisation can distribute mistakes as efficiently as it distributes authority.

In August 2026, Absa reported reducing small-business account-opening time from two days to under thirty minutes. It also reported cutting the time spent preparing financial information for credit assessment from two to five days to four hours. The four-hour figure covers that preparatory work, rather than the entire loan-approval process.

For a business owner, faster account opening means being able to begin transacting sooner. For a credit team, less time preparing financial statements leaves more time to assess whether a borrower can repay.

The commercial gain depends on customers then choosing to use the bank. A faster process that opens an account nobody needs will not rescue a weak proposition.

The returns have to follow.

Absa’s first-half 2026 headline earnings rose 8 percent to R12.8 billion. Revenue increased 4 percent to R58.8 billion, while return on equity reached 15 percent. The latter measures profit against shareholders’ capital and helps investors assess how productively that capital is being used.

But operating costs still absorbed 53.4 percent of income, slightly more than the previous year’s 53.2 percent. Earnings were improving faster than revenue, without a corresponding improvement in that measure of operating efficiency.

In March, the group had expected a return on equity of around 16 percent for 2026. By August, its guidance was around 15 percent. Its March results had set a medium-term range of 16 to 19 percent for 2027–2030, with costs approaching half of income by 2028.

Lower interest rates squeezed margins in several African markets. Fihla cannot set those rates. He can influence how much business the bank wins beyond lending, how effectively it serves existing customers and how much it spends to do so.

A company borrowing from Absa may also need payroll services, foreign exchange and help collecting payments. Winning those activities can deepen the relationship and diversify revenue. It requires colleagues in different departments to work around the customer’s business rather than make the customer navigate theirs.

Kenya is part of the unfinished work.

Kenyan customers experience this strategy through their local bank, its management and its service decisions. A group chief executive’s ambitions become useful when they improve what the subsidiary can deliver.

Absa Bank Kenya reported KSh10.5 billion in profit after tax for the first half of 2026, down from approximately KSh11.7 billion a year earlier. Fihla’s regional ambitions therefore include a Kenyan business whose profitability has come under pressure.

The parent has nevertheless increased its financial exposure to Kenya. Following a tender offer, August reporting put its stake at approximately 72 percent, up from about 68.5 percent. It acquired roughly 189 million shares, below the quantity that would have taken ownership to the proposed ceiling of 85 percent.

Buying shares from existing owners directs money to those sellers. It is not, by itself, fresh capital for the bank to lend. The greater ownership gives the parent a larger claim on future earnings and a larger exposure to whether the Kenyan business performs.

For customers, the more useful promise of a regional group is the ability to carry a banking relationship across a border without beginning again at every stop. An exporter needs payments to arrive reliably, foreign exchange at a competitive price and a bank that understands the counterparty. A small business needs access to the group’s capabilities without being treated as too small to deserve them.

Delivering that requires local judgment. A service designed in Johannesburg will not automatically fit a Kenyan trader’s cash flows. Scale becomes valuable when the group can share what works while allowing its country teams to adapt it.

A bank that can act without him.

Fihla’s arrival gives Absa an experienced operator. Sustained improvement requires many more people to become effective decision-makers.

A bank in which every difficult choice reaches the chief executive remains dependent on one person’s time. It also leaves the next generation of leaders short of practice. Responsibility has to be exercised before succession becomes an urgent board agenda item.

The former union official who confronted Johannesburg’s finances now faces a different institution with a familiar tension. People want the resources to do their work. Those controlling the resources want assurance that they will be used well. Customers experience the delay when the two cannot agree.

Fihla’s task is to make that agreement routine.

The branch manager should know which appointments fall within an approved budget. The credit officer should know where judgment ends and escalation begins. The customer should receive a decision that someone is willing to own.

If Absa becomes that bank, its improvement will be visible well beyond the next earnings presentation. A manager will fill a necessary vacancy without waiting three months for permission, and without needing Kenny Fihla to hear about it.