Nancy Njau, the insider who took Family Bank public.

Step by step, Nancy Njau has broken the glass ceiling to sit at the helm of Family Bank. She joined the lender in 2002, when it was still Family Finance Building Society, a savings and mortgage house with 11 branches. On 1 January 2024 she became its managing director and chief executive. On 23 June 2026 she stood at the Nairobi Securities Exchange as the bank’s shares began trading on the main market.

The bank she now runs has 96 branches in 32 counties, about 5,000 agents and 1.4 million customers. Its profit after tax rose from KSh 2.5bn in 2023, the year before she took charge, to KSh 5.4bn in 2025. In the first six months of 2026 it made KSh 3.7bn, 62% more than in the same period a year earlier.

Five names on a short list.

The board announced her appointment in November 2023, choosing an insider to succeed Rebecca Mbithi, who had led the bank for five years. Mbithi was Family Bank’s first female chief executive. Njau is its second.

Her appointment added her name to a short list. When it was announced, the women running Kenyan banks included Nasim Devji, who has led Diamond Trust Bank since 2001, Betty Korir at Credit Bank, Anne Karanja at Postbank and Joyce Ann Wainaina at Citibank Kenya. Annastacia Kimtai had taken over KCB Bank Kenya, the country’s largest lender, in April 2023. Mary Mulili became chief executive of UBA Kenya on 19 January 2024, 18 days after Njau took office.

By October 2025, Business Today counted five women in charge of Kenyan commercial banks: Njau, Kimtai, Devji, Korir and Mulili.

Ledgers and people.

Njau is an accountant by training. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce in accounting from Kenyatta University and an MBA in strategic management from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT). She also holds a Higher Diploma in human resource management, is a Certified Public Accountant of Kenya (CPA-K) and is a certified executive leadership coach, trained through CDI Africa.

She has continued to study while working. She attended the Advanced Management Program at Strathmore University Business School and executive programmes at CEIBS in Accra and IESE Business School in Barcelona. She is a member of the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Kenya, the Institute of Human Resource Management and the Kenya Institute of Management.

Nine posts in 22 years.

She started as a graduate clerk, working in branch operations and retail banking. Family Finance, founded by Titus Muya in 1984, became Family Bank in 2007, five years into her time there. About two years after the conversion she was made a branch manager.

The promotions that followed took her through most of the bank’s customer-facing business:

• November 2010: senior manager
• March 2013: regional manager, first for Rift Valley and Western Kenya and later for the Nairobi central business district, responsible for branch deposits, loans and efficiency
• January 2017: head of retail banking
• May 2019: head of strategic partnerships, building alliances with companies and development institutions
• January 2020: chief officer, public sector banking, handling the bank’s business with ministries, state agencies and county governments
• August 2023: chief commercial officer, in charge of commercial strategy, including SME and corporate banking
• 1 January 2024: managing director and chief executive

That is nine posts at one institution, from a clerk’s desk to the corner office. She took over a bank whose systems and customers she already knew.

The brief.

Family Bank’s stated vision is “to be the financial institution that leads in the positive transformation of people’s lives in Africa”. Her appointment raised expectations in three areas: innovation, gender diversity in leadership and customer service.

Research on women in senior roles gave some grounds for those expectations.

A 2015 meta-analysis in the Academy of Management Journal, pooling 140 studies, found that companies with more women on their boards tended to earn higher accounting returns, especially in countries with strong protection for shareholders. The link with stock-market performance was close to zero.

A 2016 meta-analysis of 87 samples, published in Corporate Governance: An International Review, linked women directors with stronger corporate social performance, more so in countries with greater gender parity.

A study in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management examined 4,271 medical-product recalls at 92 listed companies between 2002 and 2013. Firms with at least two women on the board announced the most serious recalls 28 days sooner than firms with all-male boards. A single woman director did not speed up those recalls.

Writing in Harvard Business Review in April 2021, Corinne Post of Lehigh University and her colleagues reported on 163 multinational companies tracked over 13 years. After women joined the executive team, the firms became more open to change and less inclined to take risks, made fewer acquisitions and spent more on research and development. The shift appeared only where the team already included at least one woman.

Most of this evidence concerns boards and executive teams rather than chief executives, and two of the four studies found effects only where women were not alone at the table.

Running as you learn.

On her first anniversary as chief executive, she described the job in an interview as “a matter of running as you learn”, Kenyan Wall Street reported.

Her first big task was structural. In June 2024 shareholders approved a non-operating holding company to own Family Bank Kenya and any non-banking subsidiaries. The bank’s chairman, Lazarus Muema, told The Standard in May 2025 that the bank was looking beyond Kenya and needed a group structure to expand. He also gave the rallying call: Family Bank wants to become a tier-one bank, joining the country’s largest lenders by market share, by 2029.

The route there runs through a five-year strategy for 2025 to 2029, built around customer propositions and digital banking. The bank brought in a consultant to draw up the plan, and the cost helped push operating expenses up 40% in the first quarter of 2025, The Standard reported.

In the same report, Njau said the bank held a great deal of data and wanted its decisions to follow it, with its PesaPap digital platform leading the work. “We do not want to sit somewhere and purport to know the needs of our customers,” she said. She named diaspora remittances, more than half of which come from North America, as a corridor the bank wants to tap.

By mid-2026, 92% of the bank’s transactions were digital, and its merchant partners numbered 118,846, up from 91,500 a year earlier, Khusoko reported.

The numbers.

*Compared with the first half of 2025.

In 2025 the bank’s cost-to-income ratio fell to 68% from 74%, so each shilling of income cost 68 cents to earn instead of 74. Its total capital stood at 19.6% of risk-weighted assets, and the board recommended a dividend of KSh 1.20 a share.

In its half-year statement in August 2026, Njau said the bank had strengthened its balance sheet, grown its income streams and kept capital and liquidity strong. In those six months it lent KSh 35.6bn to retail and small-business customers and KSh 15.2bn to commercial clients.

Capital first, then the bell.

In 2025 Family Bank sold new shares to private investors. It sought KSh 6.09bn and raised KSh 8bn. Shareholders’ funds, KSh 16.9bn at the end of 2023, reached KSh 34.8bn by March 2026.

The listing came next. On 23 June 2026, 1.66 billion existing shares moved from the over-the-counter market to the main board of the Nairobi Securities Exchange in a listing by introduction. No new money was raised. The reference price of KSh 18 valued the bank at about KSh 29.9bn, or 0.86 times the book value of its equity. Standard Investment Bank, which advised on the deal, called it the largest private-sector admission to the exchange in more than 17 years.

“This is not the destination, but the beginning of an even bigger and exciting chapter,” Njau said at the bell-ringing ceremony.

The shares touched KSh 50 in early trading and closed the first day at KSh 26, up 44%. By 31 July they had closed at KSh 32.50, 81% above the reference price, valuing the bank at KSh 54bn. They have since eased, closing at KSh 27.90 on 13 October 2026, still 55% above where they started.

What the market will watch.

Until June, Family Bank’s shares traded over the counter. On the main board its results now reach a far wider pool of investors, and two trends in its balance sheet will be read closely.

Bad loans have grown with the book. Gross non-performing loans rose from KSh 14.0bn at the end of 2023 to KSh 17.2bn in March 2026. The bank’s ratio of non-performing loans stood at 14.1% in March 2025, below the industry average of 16% at the time, according to The Standard.

The balance sheet has also tilted towards the government. Loans made up 61.0% of assets at the end of 2023 and 47.1% by March 2026. Holdings of government securities more than doubled from KSh 34.8bn, or 24.5% of assets, to KSh 74.0bn, or 35.5%, by the end of 2025. Lending to the private sector drove most of the asset growth in the first half of 2026, and investors will watch whether that continues.

In October 2026, on Citizen Digital’s She Means Business podcast, Njau explained why two borrowers with similar loans can pay different interest rates: pricing follows each borrower’s risk, from repayment history and income to cash flow. She also spoke about how banks weigh digital convenience against the risks that come with it.

A code to crack

When she took office, Njau had a code to crack, and she hit the ground running. In 33 months the bank has more than doubled its annual profit, doubled its capital, built a holding company and listed its shares.

The next test is on a calendar. The 2025 to 2029 strategy ends in a little over three years, and so does the deadline for tier one. The bank Njau joined had 11 branches. The one she runs now answers to the market every trading day.