Esther Waititu is stepping down as Safaricom‘s Chief Financial Services Officer, with her last day set for July 31, 2026.
She joined the company in 2023 after spending more than a decade in banking, including senior roles at KCB Group and Standard Bank, and has spent the past three years running the division behind M-PESA’s financial services push.
CEO Peter Ndegwa told staff in an internal memo that Waititu was leaving to pursue other opportunities, and that her exit was made at her own request.
Safaricom has not named a permanent replacement, but Boniface Mungania, who previously led the company’s public sector digital transformation work, will step in as interim Chief Financial Services Officer.
During her time in the role, Waititu oversaw M-PESA’s shift from a simple mobile money service into a wider financial platform offering savings, credit, insurance and investment products.
One of the more notable launches under her watch was Ziidi Trader, an M-PESA mini-app that lets users buy and sell shares on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, which went live in February 2026.
She also led the migration of M-PESA’s systems to what Safaricom calls Fintech 2.0, a cloud based infrastructure meant to make the platform more reliable and easier to scale.
That work also underpinned the Daraja developer ecosystem, which lets outside developers and businesses build their own services on top of M-PESA.
Waititu’s departure adds to a run of high profile exits at Safaricom this year. Michael Mutiga, who served as Chief Enterprise Business Officer, is leaving to become CEO of Stanbic Bank Kenya and South Sudan starting August 1.
Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, who spent five years running M-Pesa Africa and briefly served as acting CFSO, left Safaricom at the end of March and joined Absa Group in April as head of personal and private banking, based in Johannesburg.
With three senior executives leaving within a matter of months, Safaricom will be under some pressure to settle its leadership bench and reassure the market that M-PESA‘s momentum, still one of the company’s biggest revenue engines, won’t slow down during the transition.
