Eva Ngigi Sarwari, managing director of Finserve Africa and Equity Group’s director of payments and international banking, has died at 45 while on a business trip to China.
TechCabal first reported the news.
Her colleagues confirmed it in a statement today, calling it a sudden and profound shock. The statement gave no cause or date of death and said more updates would follow.
She spent more than 20 years in banking and payments, and her last roles put her at the center of how money moves across Africa.
Sarwari began at a local bank in 2005, fresh out of university. She said the first job was less glamorous than she expected: printing customer statements on a dot-matrix printer, folding them, putting them in envelopes and handing them out.
She moved to teller work, then sales. A mentor later told her to try corporate banking, and she did. According to her profile, she was a relationship manager at Co-operative Bank of Kenya, who got customers onto electronic banking, which meant demonstrating the products, overseeing installations and training users.
She said she liked putting products together into solutions for clients and seeing businesses change as a result.
Stanbic and Standard Chartered
She spent just over two years at Stanbic Bank Kenya from 2010, selling transactional products and services. In November 2012 she moved to Standard Chartered, where she stayed for more than seven years in transaction banking.
Sarwari started as a principal working with development organizations and public-sector clients across East Africa. From July 2017 to January 2020 she was head of transaction banking for commercial banking, responsible for revenue growth, product relevance and digital transformation in Kenya and East Africa.
She told The Standard that the push toward leadership came at Standard Chartered, after several leadership programmes and a lot of observation of managers she admired and managers whose methods she disliked.
Later, she went back to school for an MBA while her son was only two, and took the maximum number of units to finish quickly.
Venture Building and Visa
In 2020 she was a venture lead at SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s venture-building arm. That same year, in September, she joined Visa as senior director and country manager for Kenya, South Sudan and Somalia.
Sarwari held the job until December 2024 and was responsible for designing and carrying out Visa’s growth strategy across the three markets.
Back to Banking
Sarwari joined Equity Bank in January 2025 as group director for payments and international banking, in charge of executing the bank’s payments strategy across Africa.
In April 2026 she became managing director of Finserve Africa, the group’s payments and digital financial services subsidiary, where she oversaw strategy, commercial direction and operations.
Her career therefore covered a local bank, a regional lender, an international bank’s venture arm, a global card network and one of Africa’s largest banking groups. She worked on the same problem throughout: getting customers and businesses to move money through better systems.
Her colleagues said their thoughts were with her family, friends and co-workers. We join them in wishing all her loved ones comfort in this difficult time.
