Kenya's Banking Revolution

To meet the future of retail banking, cross Moi Avenue into the rougher part of downtown Nairobi, pass the Chicken Spot restaurant and squeeze between four stalls selling counterfeit mobile phones, and you’ll reach a door — and behind it a tiny room containing a hat stand, a wall calendar, a strip light and a desk.

Patrick Maina’s offices don’t look like a bank, his bank — Safaricom — doesn’t sound like one, and Maina doesn’t appear at all like a banker: 38 years old, he likes his suits iridescent and his head shaved; his manner is friendly and modest. Maina’s results over the past few years are particularly unbanklike.

While Western banks crashed, Maina’s fortunes rocketed. Started with an investment of $1,000 four years ago, his financial empire now runs to 218 outlets across Kenya. Underlining how different Safaricom is from conventional banking, Maina praises his company not for how it enriched him — he earns $150,000 a year and owns a Lexus and a house in an upscale Nairobi housing development — but for how it boosted a nation. “Safaricom helped people, upgraded their lifestyles, helped them to get jobs,” he says.

Safaricom also helped start a banking revolution, one coming to the world from Africa. Says Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay, a California-based mobile-banking innovator: “Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here. The new models for what will be mainstream throughout the world are being incubated here. It’s going to change the world.”

An evolution of the innovations in banking first made by Muhammad Yunus?

JNOMICS

TIME