I have a habit that many may find somewhere between endearing and mildly eccentric. I call it, ‘billboard surfing’. Whenever I am commuting around Nairobi — or anywhere else in Kenya for that matter — and I spot an out-of-home campaign that catches my eye, for the right or wrong reasons, I take a photo, and think about what the brand is actually saying, how it is saying it, and whether the execution lives up to the ambition. It is, at its core, a marketing practitioner’s occupational hazard disguised as a sort of commuting and traffic time game. Most billboards do not survive this level of scrutiny. The Branch one I spotted today did — and it sent me down a rabbit hole that I think is worth documenting in some depth.

The billboard in question was clean, direct, and confident. Light blue background. The Branch logo in the top left. A rear quarter shot of a gleaming white car dominating the right half of the frame. And a headline that did exactly what a great headline should do: stopped me in my tracks and made me think. “Your Next Level Deserves Wheels.” Below it, a product name — Branch Autoloans — a prominent QR code, and an SMS shortcode: SMS ‘Gari’ to 24788. That is it. No cluttered copy, no fine-print avalanche, no desperate attempt to explain everything in the space of a billboard. Just a clear value proposition, a compelling visual, and two separate conversion pathways for two different types of consumer behaviour.

I took the photo and then started thinking about what it actually means that Branch — Branch, the mobile lending app that started out giving Kenyans emergency KSh 500 loans in under a minute — is now advertising car loans on a Nairobi billboard. To me, it seemed like a massive transformation that required further investigation. I am that kind of guy, after all. 

Where Branch Came From: Rewriting the Rules of Credit

To understand how significant this moment is, you have to go back to the beginning. Branch launched in Kenya in 2015 at a time when the majority of Kenyans who needed credit had precisely two options: borrow from a SACCO or Co-operative, which required membership and collateral and patience, or go to a commercial bank, which required a salary slip, a guarantor, a credit history, and typically several weeks of processing time. If you had none of those things — if you were informal sector, unbanked, young, or simply invisible to the legacy credit infrastructure — you were largely on your own.

Branch and other early movers saw that gap and built an entirely different model around it. The core innovation was not the mobile app itself — it was the credit scoring engine underneath it. Rather than relying on formal credit bureau data that simply did not exist for most of their target customers, Branch’s algorithms interrogated the data that was already on people’s smartphones: calling patterns, app usage, SMS transaction histories from banks and mobile money providers, and dozens of other behavioural signals that, taken together, painted a surprisingly accurate picture of creditworthiness. The now-famous anecdote about how frequently a borrower calls their mother serving as a proxy for trustworthiness is not pure fantasy— it reflects exactly the kind of lateral, data-driven thinking that defined the early digital lending model in Kenya and distinguished it so sharply from anything the established financial services sector was doing at the time.

Equally critical was the infrastructure Branch plugged into: M-Pesa. Safaricom’s mobile money platform was not merely a distribution channel for Branch — it was the foundational layer that made the whole model work. Loans were disbursed in seconds to an M-Pesa wallet and repaid via the same. No bank account required. No branch visit. No forms. This was financial services reimagined from first principles for a mobile-first, M-Pesa-native population, and it worked spectacularly. By the time the dust settled on the early digital lending era in Kenya, Branch had disbursed over US$600 million to more than four million customers — a scale that very few traditional microfinance institutions had achieved across their entire institutional lifetimes.

The era was not without controversy, it must be said. Digital lenders in Kenya — Branch included — operated in a regulatory grey zone for several years, and practices around loan recovery were, in many documented instances, deeply problematic. Borrowers’ contacts were called and messaged by recovery agents. Employers were notified. The social shame mechanisms deployed were a long way from the ethical standards that consumers and regulators rightly expected. The 2022 licensing framework for digital lenders, requiring Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) registration and adherence to defined operating protocols, was a necessary and overdue intervention. Branch, to its credit, had already begun professionalizing its operations in anticipation of — and arguably ahead of — that regulatory shift.

The Century Microfinance Bank Acquisition: From Digital Lending Fintech to Fully Fledged Bank

In January 2022, everything changed structurally. The CBK announced the approval of Branch’s acquisition of a 84.89% shareholding in Century Microfinance Bank, effective 1st January 2022. I wrote about this at the time — you can read that blog post here — and my core argument then was that this was not merely a licensing transaction. It was a strategic transformation. Branch was not buying a bank to become a bank in the traditional sense. It was acquiring a regulated deposit-taking licence and a CBK-approved operating structure to become something that did not yet have a widely accepted name in the East African market: a fully digital, algorithmically-native neo-bank.

Century MFB itself was modest at the time of the acquisition — two branches in Nairobi, around 26,000 customers, focused primarily on smallholder farmers and SMEs, with a market share of below one percent of the microfinance banking sector. What it gave Branch was not scale; it was legitimacy, regulatory cover, and the right to take deposits. That right is enormously consequential. The ability to mobilize customer savings and deploy them as loans — rather than relying entirely on equity and debt funding — fundamentally changes the unit economics of a financial services business. It also dramatically expands the range of products that a company can credibly offer its customers.

At the formal signing ceremony, Branch’s CEO and co-founder Matt Flannery outlined an ambitious vision: a Pan-African digital bank, starting from Kenya. Branch already operated in Tanzania, Nigeria, and India. Kenya, with its sophisticated mobile money infrastructure, relatively high financial inclusion rates, and Branch’s own deep reservoir of customer data, was the obvious launchpad for that continental ambition.

The Branch of 2026: A Very Different Beast

Fast-forward to today. Pull up the Branch app — which I did, after scanning that billboard QR code — and what greets you is a product suite that bears almost no resemblance to the simple loan app of 2015. The home screen offers three core service categories: savings and investments at up to 16.5% per annum with lock-in periods of three, six, or twelve months; personal loans of up to KSh 300,000 delivered within minutes; and a full digital wallet for transfers, bill payments, and receiving money. Over three million users in Kenya have downloaded and actively use the app. The platform has disbursed over sixteen million loans in the country to date.

And now, sitting atop all of that, is the auto loan product. Branch Autoloans. On a billboard on a Nairobi road. Advertising, essentially, the same category of secured asset-backed lending that KCB, Equity, NCBA, and Absa have offered their customers for decades. Except Branch is doing it digitally, algorithmically, and — based on everything I know about the company’s historical approach — with a significantly faster decisioning process than a traditional bank branch credit committee can match.

This is not a marginal extension of the product portfolio. It is a statement of competitive intent. Branch is now playing in the same arena as Kenya’s largest commercial banks, competing for customers who might otherwise walk into a mainstream bank to arrange vehicle financing. The difference is that Branch meets those customers where they already live — on their phones — and can leverage over a decade of behavioural data on millions of Kenyan consumers to make faster, more automated credit decisions than institutions still reliant on static bureau data and manual underwriting can typically achieve.

The Billboard That Started It All: An OOH Marketing Masterclass

Let me return to the billboard, because the marketing execution itself is worth examining on its own terms. The use of a QR code on an out-of-home placement is no longer novel in Kenya — it has become increasingly commonplace across brands operating in the Nairobi market and beyond — but Branch’s execution here is particularly tight. The billboard functions simultaneously as an awareness vehicle and a direct response tool. The QR code drives to an auto loan landing page. The SMS shortcode provides an alternative conversion pathway for those who prefer not to scan. Two different user behaviours, both captured, both attributable directly to the outdoor placement.

I recall a conversation from a few years back when I was moderating a panel on digital financial services and Rose Muturi, Branch’s East Africa Managing Director, was among the panelists, and we got into a discussion about precisely this kind of offline-to-digital attribution. She confirmed what many of us in the marketing industry had suspected but not yet quantified publicly: the QR-to-application conversion from out-of-home placements is real, measurable, and — when the creative and the placement are right — commercially significant. People see a billboard, scan a code, and take out a loan. The loop closes cleanly, and cleanly attributed awareness spend is exactly what every performance-oriented marketing team is chasing.

One thing I will note, however, from a MarTech perspective: when I followed the QR code through to the auto loan lead capture process, I found a Google Form waiting at the end of the funnel. A Google Form. For a company with Branch’s data engineering capabilities, its CRM sophistication, and its stated ambition to be a Pan-African Neobank, routing prospective auto loan customers through a generic Google Form is a meaningful disconnect. It seems quite basic relative to everything else Branch is doing, and more importantly, it almost certainly means that auto loan leads are not flowing directly and automatically into whatever loan origination system or CRM powers the back end. That is a conversion leakage problem as much as it is a brand experience problem. The billboard is excellent. The conversion funnel or customer journey needs urgent work.

The Architectural Advantage: Born Digital vs. Built Digital

Here is where I want to be precise, because the lazy version of this story — scrappy digital upstart outsmarts lumbering legacy giants — is both inaccurate and unfair to what Kenya’s established banks have achieved over the past decade.

It would be intellectually dishonest to suggest that institutions like Equity Bank, KCB, NCBA, Absa, and Co-op Bank have stood still while Branch has been building. They have not. Each of them has made significant and credible investments in digital lending, mobile banking, and app-based financial services. Several of their digital loan products are genuinely competitive with Branch on rate, processing speed, and credit limits — and in some cases exceed what Branch currently offers, particularly in the SME and business banking segments where legacy institutions carry deep sectoral relationships, established collateral frameworks, and a breadth of product that a younger institution cannot yet match. Any honest analysis of Kenya’s financial services market has to acknowledge that.

The distinction worth drawing, therefore, is not one of product superiority — it is one of architectural DNA. Branch was built digital-first and data-first from its very first line of code. Its credit scoring engine, its product delivery stack, its customer acquisition model, and its entire operational infrastructure were designed from scratch for a mobile-native, M-Pesa-enabled consumer market. There are no legacy core banking systems underneath it, no inherited branch network generating overhead that every new product decision must account for, and no decades of manual underwriting culture to gradually, institutionally unlearn. When Branch decides to launch a new product — an auto loan, a savings account, a digital wallet — it does not have to route that decision through governance structures originally built to protect a physical distribution model.

Legacy banks, even the most progressive and digitally ambitious among them, are executing their digital transformation initiatives on top of inherited foundations. That is genuinely difficult and expensive work, and the best of them — Equity’s digital banking operation and KCB’s mobile lending infrastructure are strong examples — are doing it impressively well. But there is a meaningful structural difference between a bank that has become digital and a bank that was born digital. Branch belongs to the second category. In a market that is increasingly mobile-first, algorithmically-served, and deeply impatient with process friction, that architectural bias — the absence of legacy rather than the assertion of superiority — is a durable and compounding competitive advantage even when individual products look broadly similar on the surface. Lean organisations built on modern infrastructure can iterate faster, fail cheaper, and pivot more decisively than organisations managing the weight of what came before, and that agility premium only grows more valuable as the pace of market change accelerates.

A Decade of Data on Kenya’s Digital Native Consumers

There is one more dimension to the Branch story that I think is under-appreciated in most of the coverage I have read, and it connects directly to the auto loan product that triggered this entire reflection. Branch has spent a decade accumulating behavioural, transactional, and credit data on millions of Kenyan consumers — predominantly millennials and Gen Z — who have been digital-first and M-Pesa-native from the very beginning of their financial lives. These are customers who have never had to queue at a bank branch, who have never filled out a paper loan application form, and who have a deeply ingrained expectation that financial services should be instant, mobile, and friction-free.

Branch has been their financial institution of choice — or at minimum their first stop for credit — precisely because it understood and served that expectation from day one. Over a decade, those millions of customer interactions have generated a proprietary data asset that no competitor, however well-capitalised or digitally sophisticated, can simply buy or replicate. It is the accumulated intelligence of over sixteen million loan transactions across millions of individual customers, each one adding a data point to a credit model that was already ahead of the market when it launched and has only grown more refined since.

As Branch extends into savings, digital wallets, and now vehicle financing, it is deploying that data asset across an ever-wider product surface area. The same algorithmic intelligence that determined whether a first-time borrower was creditworthy for a KSh 1,000 emergency loan in 2016 is now, in a considerably more sophisticated form, informing whether that same borrower — now perhaps ten years older, with a decade of Branch transaction history behind them — qualifies for a car loan. That level of rich customer data is genuinely rare, and it is one of the most powerful things Branch brings to any product category it enters.

What Comes Next

Branch is now, in every meaningful sense, a bank. It is regulated by the CBK. It takes deposits, pays competitive savings rates, runs a digital wallet, disburses personal loans at scale, and — as of this billboard campaign — offers vehicle financing. Its app has over three million registered users in Kenya alone, and its presence across Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, and India gives it the kind of multi-market data depth that sharpens its models in ways that single-country players cannot replicate.

The question I am watching most closely is how aggressively Branch pursues the SME and business banking segment — which remains, as it was for Century MFB before the acquisition, an enormous and underserved opportunity in Kenya. The algorithmic credit scoring model that transformed personal lending has almost certainly been retooled at scale for business lending, supplier financing, and working capital solutions in ways that combine Branch’s speed and data advantage with the kind of product depth that SME owners genuinely need. That is the next frontier, and it is where the competition with Kenya’s mainstream commercial banks will get truly interesting.

A billboard surfing session on a Nairobi road started all of this thinking. That, ultimately, is what great out-of-home advertising is supposed to do: make you stop, look, think, and dig considerably deeper than the creative itself requires. Branch gave me exactly that today and what I found when I dug deeper was a story that is considerably larger than a car loan.