Equity Bank — The Bank the Poor Built
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Show notes
In 1993, a supervisor at the Central Bank of Kenya carried a thin folder into a meeting room in Nairobi.
Inside the folder were the books of a small building society in Murang'a. Twenty-seven thousand customers. Most of the accounts dormant. More than half the loans bad. Capital — on a real basis — negative.
The recommendation was simple. Wind it up. Pay back what little was left. Move on.
Thirty-three years later, that same building society has eighteen million customers across six countries. Fifteen billion dollars in assets. And a market value that has minted more millionaires in one Kenyan village than any IPO in African history.
This is the story of how the institution every regulator wanted to bury became the bank the rest of Africa now studies.
