Anne Kinuthia-Otieno has left her job as managing director of Airtel Money Kenya, ending a run of nearly five years at the head of the company.
She announced the move herself on LinkedIn on Saturday, July 25, 2026, saying she was moving on to something new without giving details.
No successor has been named yet, and the company has not put out its own statement on the departure.
Kinuthia-Otieno joined Airtel in August 2021, coming over from Absa Bank Kenya, where she had spent years in banking roles covering products, governance, and SME lending.
Before Absa she worked at Barclays, mostly on the risk side. That banking and risk background is part of why Airtel brought her in to run a mobile money business that was, at the time, still a distant second to Safaricom’s M-PESA.
The numbers from her tenure tell the story of how much ground Airtel Money closed. When she started, the company held just 3.1% of Kenya’s mobile money subscriptions, against M-PESA’s 96.8%.
By March 2026, Airtel Money’s share had grown to 10.9%, while M-PESA had slipped to 89.1%. It’s still a lopsided market, but the gap narrowed in a way it hadn’t for years before she took over.
Under her leadership, Airtel Money also went through a major overhaul of its core mobile money platform, built out its agent and merchant network significantly, and signed new partnerships with banks and other players to widen where and how customers could use the service.
In 2022, Airtel Money Kenya was spun off as its own company, separate from Airtel Networks Kenya, so it could be licensed and regulated directly by the Central Bank of Kenya.
That restructuring happened right as she stepped into the role, which meant she was building the business up while it was also being redefined as a standalone entity.
Her exit lands at a busy moment for Airtel. On July 23, Airtel Africa confirmed it wants to list its mobile money business, Airtel Money, on the London Stock Exchange, with a target of the second half of 2026, pending regulatory approval.
Airtel Money’s business across Africa has been growing fast too, with 56.5 million customers by the end of June, up 23.3% year over year, and annualized transaction value topping $245 billion.
There’s also been a broader shuffle happening around her. Just weeks before her announcement, Airtel Kenya’s telecom side got a new managing director, Djibril Tobe, who took over from Ashish Malhotra on July 1.
Over at Safaricom, the leadership of the mobile money side has been shifting too. Esther Waititu, Safaricom’s chief financial services officer, is set to leave on July 31 after nearly three years in the role, with Boniface Mungania stepping in as interim chief financial services officer.
That follows the earlier departure of Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, the former head of M-PESA Africa, who has since joined Absa Group.
Kinuthia-Otieno’s departure means Kenya’s two biggest mobile money providers are both losing senior leaders around the same time, right as Airtel prepares for a public listing and competition between the two companies keeps intensifying.
