Yesterday, the 25th September 2026, I was at the Nairobi Street Kitchen for the launch of Absa Next, the new digital financial services app from Absa Bank Kenya. The bank had been teasing a giant white X ahead of the event without saying what it stood for, and two enormous Xs flanking the stage were the first thing you saw walking in. Moses Muthui, the Consumer Banking Director, said everyone had been asking what X was, and Yusuf Omari, the bank’s Managing Director and CEO, got the biggest laugh of the morning by asking everyone in the room to turn to the person next to them and ask, “are you my ex?” The X, it turned out, was Next.

Absa Next is, in my view, Absa in Kenya disrupting itself before it is disrupted. It is a bank building what is effectively a neobank, in the mould of a Monzo or a Revolut, within its own confines. That is an unusual thing for a Kenyan bank to do, and whether it works is a question I do not think anyone, including Absa, can answer yet. This post is my attempt to lay out what was launched, what the people behind it said, how it sits against what NCBA Loop, the other banks and M-PESA already offer, and where I think the claims need scrutiny.

Absa Is Disrupting Itself Before It Gets Disrupted

The most important fact about Absa Next is one that was said almost in passing on stage: you do not need to be an Absa customer to use it. Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, who now runs Personal and Private Banking for the whole Absa Group, put it plainly: this is not a product for Absa customers, it is a product for anyone. Onboarding, as Steve Omamo demonstrated, takes under a minute and asks for three things, a mobile number, an ID number and a name, with more requested as you use more of the app.

That single design decision is what makes this something other than a mobile banking app. A mobile banking app is a front end to accounts you already hold. Absa Next is a second, open front door into the bank, aimed at people who may never have walked through the first one. Absa Bank confirms that Absa Next and the existing Absa app will coexist, with distinct functionalities, experiences and value propositions. Read that carefully. Absa is not upgrading its app. It is putting a new digital bank alongside its old one and, in the medium term, letting customers decide which they prefer. This is genuinely fascinating from my perspective and suggests a darwinian approach where the consumer will ultimately decide which of the two apps they prefer going forward. 

That is exactly what Monzo and Revolut did to banks in their markets from the outside. Absa’s bet is that it can do it to itself from the inside, and in doing so challenge not just its own existing financial services offerings but also what other banks in Kenya currently offer from a digital banking perspective, and quite possibly some of what Safaricom’s M-PESA offers too. The reality is that Kenya has many, many banks and fintechs offering apps for a myriad of customer segments and use cases, and one could reasonably say that a new one is not essential or needed unless it brings something to the market that is truly different and resets the status quo. Only time will tell, but from what we saw at the launch, the ambition has some serious audacity. 

What Absa Next Actually Does

Absa Next has been built locally in Kenya from the ground up, on cloud infrastructure, to address the needs of the modern consumer and the small business in one integrated digital financial services platform. Absa describes it as Kenya’s first integrated digital financial solution, which is something we need to validate. Customers can save individually or in a group at rates of up to 7%, access instant credit from as little as KES 500 up to KES 1 million for personal or business needs, view and manage personal and business finances from a single dashboard, link both Absa and non-Absa Visa cards, and split expenses with family and friends. Through open banking, accounts held at other financial institutions can be aggregated into a single view, and the credit decisioning uses alternative scoring that draws on a wider range of financial behaviours and data points than a conventional bank would.

According to Absa, customers can invest and earn returns of up to 16%. Absa also states that investment products such as unit trusts, money market funds and equity funds are coming soon to the app. So, as at launch, the 16% is a promise rather than a product, and I would treat it as such until it is live. Second, the demo on stage showed that the home screen is focussed on two modules, Get Cash and Grow Your Money, with a Personal Account and a BIZ Account sitting side by side in the same carousel under one login. 

The group banking is the most locally relevant aspect of Next. There are two distinct group types with different approaches. A Chama is the familiar Kenyan structure, where members contribute regularly towards a specific goal, with an admin who can see exactly who has and has not paid. A Harambee Group is looser, a cause that anyone can contribute to without joining, with tracking available to those who want it. Anyone who has ever chased contributions on a WhatsApp group will understand why Yusuf Omari spent time on this. Beyond that there are bill splitting, request money, standing orders, QR payments, airtime, a prize-linked savings product, savings goals and challenges with friends, and a rewards scheme called NEXT Coins that Steve Omamo said will reward every transaction a customer makes. Movement of money within Absa Next is free.

There is one more detail that only a hands-on look reveals. The version of the app in the Google Play Store carries a wallet carousel with three types: a Personal Wallet, a Merchant Wallet with its own merchant number and QR payments, and an Agent Wallet sitting behind an Activate button. That is a three-sided payments architecture, consumer, merchant and cash-in cash-out agent, which is precisely the structure that made M-PESA what it is. Nobody said this on stage and it raises an obvious question I could not get answered on the day: is the agent tier Absa’s existing network of more than 8,000 agency outlets being brought into the app, or is this an open recruitment play? I also noticed that the store listing and the stage build are not the same interface, which suggests the listing has not caught up with the launch build. I will know which one I actually have once I start using it properly next week.

The app has also been in the market longer than the launch implies. Apple’s version history shows a version 1.0 on 27th January 2026, and a local blog published a hands-on review in late August 2026, a month before the formal launch, which described the coins tiers, the weekly and monthly prize draws and the savings terms in some detail. Sitoyo Lopokoiyit said on stage that he had personally been testing it since March 2026. Therefore, what was launched on Friday, in other words, was an app that had already been through eight months of live iteration.

The Four Voices On Stage & What They Said

Four Absa executives spoke, and between them they told the story of the product from four different perspectives. I have paraphrased where the stage remarks were informal and quoted where the bank’s own written statements match what was said.

Moses Muthui, Consumer Banking Director, set the generational focus. Absa, he reminded the room, has been part of the Kenyan story for 110 years, serving one generation of customers after another, and every generation has thrown down the same challenge to the bank to keep evolving. However, what was different this time, he said, is that the bank asked the young people who work at Absa to build the next chapter of the bank themselves. He pulled a young digital business colleague named Yegon out of the audience to make the point, and then a customer in her twenties named Sheila, whose generation the bank had asked to tell it how financial services should live in their world, and not the other way around. He articulated the same idea in strategic terms: “Digital is no longer just a channel; it is the primary way people engage with brands, services and their finances. Absa Next has been designed to deliver that experience.”

Yusuf Omari, Managing Director and CEO, told the customer research story. He described the focus groups and customer insight sessions the bank ran, and the four things customers kept asking for: instant credit without waiting six months or a year for a decision, a way to split a large entertainment bill among friends, a chama tool where the admin can see who has not contributed and act on it, and a way to invest without filling in tons of paper. Absa Next, he said, speaks to two things: your lifestyle, meaning what you do with your money every day, and your lifecycle, meaning the student leaving university, the young professional starting to invest, the family and the business owner. His most quotable line was in the written statement: “Rather than digitizing traditional banking, we have reimagined the banking experience around our customers’ goals, behaviours and aspirations.” This was, notably, his first major launch since being confirmed as substantive CEO on 10th September 2026, after two spells as interim leader.

Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, Absa Group’s Chief Executive for Personal and Private Banking, was the most interesting speaker in the room, for reasons that have as much to do with who he is as what he said. Until March this year he was Managing Director of M-PESA Africa, running the platform across seven markets, and before that he ran Safaricom’s money transfer business. He joined Absa Group in April 2026. He opened by saying that listening to Moses and Yusuf you could have thought this was a fintech event, and that after 18 years of disrupting banks, fairly successfully, it was transformative to hear bankers talk about listening to the customer and building with the customer. Banks, he said, are really boring places; nobody wakes up wanting to go to one. His most insightful line was about where innovation comes from: there is no innovation happening at the centre of the group, it happens where the bank meets its customers, and Absa Next was built by Kenyans, by Absa’s own staff, by young people for young people. He also confirmed that the app will be taken to other Absa markets, with the Kenyan team helping other countries build. According to an Absa statement: “It is an innovation informed by Kenyan consumers, and one that has the potential to shape how we serve customers across Africa.”

Steve Omamo, VP and Head of Digital Banking, gave the product walk-through, and it was possibly the most useful twenty minutes of the morning. About three years ago, he said, the team asked itself what the next phase of the bank should be, and quickly realized the only way to answer it was to ask the customer. Bankers are historically very proud, he said, but the team decided to be vulnerable and bring customers into the room. They found out customers wanted convenience, meaning everything in one place, and progress, meaning growth and building wealth. That is where the name came from — Next. He then walked through onboarding in under a minute, the payments journey, credit limits based on true affordability, savings as a way of financial life rather than a transaction, the chama and harambee groups, linking other bank accounts and Visa cards, the business account, rewards on every transaction and free internal money movement. His summary was that if you take one thing away from Absa Next, it is that it is about moving forward, progress, growth and building wealth.

A Technology Incubator Untethered From The Legacy Bank

The most revealing thing I heard all morning was not said from the stage. One of Absa Kenya’s senior technology leaders told me on the sidelines that, in order to make Next happen, the bank essentially built a technology incubator inside Absa Kenya that could operate in an untethered and unrestricted manner from the legacy Absa business, so that the team could be truly innovative and disruptive in how it conceptualized and built the app.

That is a clear statement of intent that Next was never going to be just another mobile banking app, but something significantly more ambitious. It is also, I would argue, the single most important decision in the whole programme, because the graveyard of bank digital initiatives is full of good products that were built inside the core bank and then slowly strangled by its risk committees, its legacy systems and its incentive structures.

The parallel that came to mind is Apple in the early 1980s. When Steve Jobs took over the Macintosh project in 1981, he moved the team out of Apple’s main campus into a small building a few blocks away that the team nicknamed Texaco Towers, deliberately kept it small and shielded it from the Apple II and Lisa organisations that were paying the bills. At a team retreat in January 1983 he told them it is better to be a pirate than to join the navy, and a pirate flag was famously flown over the team’s later building. The Macintosh launched on 24th January 1984. The lesson Apple learned, and that a great many companies have relearned since, is that genuinely new products rarely survive being built inside the organization whose economics they threaten.

This logic is sound and, in Kenya, unconventional. Most bank digital products here have been built either by the core technology function or by a vendor, and it shows in the results. The evidence from elsewhere is mixed enough to keep everyone honest, though. JPMorgan Chase launched a standalone digital bank called Finn in 2018 and closed it within a year because customers could get the same thing from the main Chase app. Goldman Sachs built Marcus from scratch and, after losses running to more than a billion dollars, dismantled it as a mass-market consumer bank from late 2022. 

However, Chase UK launched in 2021 as a digital-only bank inside JPMorgan, passed 2.5 million customers by the end of 2025 and turned a profit, Standard Chartered’s Mox in Hong Kong reached its first breakeven quarter in early 2026, and Discovery Bank in South Africa became profitable in 2025. The pattern in the successes is that the standalone bank was allowed to be a different business, not a different app. Whether Absa’s incubator has that kind of licence, and keeps it once the product is successful enough to attract the attention of the core bank, is the question I would most like answered in a year’s time.

The Timiza Question Absa Has To Answer

Anyone with a long enough memory will have a nagging thought at this point. Absa has done something like this before. In March 2018, when it was still Barclays Bank of Kenya, it launched Timiza, a standalone mobile wallet and micro-lending product that ran on M-PESA and did not require a Barclays account. Moses Muthui, then the bank’s head of strategy, described it at the time as five steps out of a hundred in a virtual banking strategy. Timiza grew fast, passing five million registered users by 2023, and it is still very much alive: it disbursed KES 25.1 billion in 2024 and KES 26.3 billion in 2025, and its app was last updated in September 2026.

So Absa now has three consumer apps in the market: the Absa app for account holders, Timiza for M-PESA-based micro-loans and savings, and Absa Next. Nobody at the launch addressed how the three relate, and nothing in the press pack does either. My perspective is that Timiza taught the bank two things that Absa Next is built on: that Kenyans will happily bank with a brand they do not hold an account with if the product is good enough, and that a product which depends on somebody else’s rails, as Timiza depends on Safaricom’s, can only go so far. Absa Next, with its own wallets, its own merchant and agent tiers and its own scoring, looks to me like the bank’s attempt to own the whole stack this time. But that is my own opinion, not something Absa said, and the bank owes its customers an explanation as to what will happen to Timiza going forward on this basis. 

Why Now: The Numbers Behind The Decision

The obvious question is why a bank in Absa’s position would do this now. Absa Bank Kenya is not a struggling institution looking for a lifeline. It reported a net profit of KES 22.9 billion for 2025, up 10%, and KES 10.5 billion for the first half of 2026, with a return on equity above 20%. It runs 91 branches, 208 ATMs and more than 8,000 agency outlets. Crucially, 94% of its transactions already happen on digital and alternative channels, and 71% of its customer processes have been digitized, according to its 2025 annual results. Abdi Mohamed, the previous CEO, told the media earlier this year that the bank spends between KES 2 billion and KES 3 billion a year on technology.

Those numbers are the answer, not the counter-argument. A bank that already does 94% of its transactions digitally has nothing left to gain from digitising its branches. The only growth left is in customers it does not have, and in Kenya those customers are overwhelmingly young, mobile-first and banking with their phones on somebody else’s platform. The 2025 annual report, published in March 2026, already described Absa Next as a digital-only bank for the next generation of customers, so this was a strategic decision made and disclosed well before the recent leadership changes there. 

The group context matters too. Absa Group reported 13.4 million customers and 5.4 million digitally active customers at the half year, with its Africa Regions digitally active base growing at 21%, and it now runs Personal and Private Banking as a single pan-African business under Sitoyo Lopokoiyit. Having the man who ran M-PESA across seven markets championing a Kenyan-built product as a group blueprint is arguably the real headline of the launch. Absa describes Absa Next as a blueprint for future digital banking innovation across the Absa Group footprint, which is a polite way of saying Kenya is the laboratory and Africa is the market.

The Youth Segment Is The Clear Focus

What was also clear from the launch, and from the consultations the speakers described with existing and prospective customers, is that the youth segment is the target. The demographics explain why. Three quarters of Kenyans are under 35, and the median age is roughly 20. The 2024 FinAccess household survey found formal financial inclusion at 84.8% of adults, but 82.3% of adults use mobile money against 52.5% who use a bank, and among 18 to 25 year olds exclusion actually rose slightly to 23.1%. Only 18.3% of Kenyan adults were classified as financially healthy. Kenya’s young people are financially included, but mostly through M-PESA and mostly not through a bank, and they are not doing well financially. That is both the problem Absa Next is trying to solve and the commercial opportunity it is chasing.

The chama feature is where the youth focus and the local insight meet. FinAccess found that 30.7% of adults use informal groups, which makes chamas the third most used financial service in the country after mobile money and banks. A bank that can take even a fraction of that activity onto its own platform, with the transparency Yusuf Omari described, has a genuine reason for a young customer to open the app every week rather than once a month.

NCBA Loop Is The Closest Comparison & It Has Changed Course

Going head to head, the most similar offering in the Kenyan market to Absa Next is NCBA’s Loop. I was at the launch of Loop at the Kenya National Theatre in March 2017, when it was still CBA, and I have been a Loop user ever since. I reviewed the redesigned Loop app in April 2025 and called it the best version of Loop yet and a new benchmark for a mobile banking UX in the Kenyan market, and I still think that was fair assessment. Loop pioneered the idea of a millennial-focused digital bank inside a Kenyan bank, with savings goals, a personal finance dashboard, bill scheduling, loans and, later, Money Pools for group savings and virtual cards.

But Loop and Absa Next are no longer heading in the same direction. In early 2025 Loop DFS, the NCBA fintech subsidiary that now runs it, described a pivot away from the neobank posture towards financial infrastructure and embedded finance, with credit embedded in payment transactions and sector plays in agriculture, health and education. NCBA’s digital lending is dominated by its partnership with Safaricom: the group disbursed KES 1.4 trillion in digital loans in 2025, of which Fuliza alone accounted for KES 1.24 trillion, while M-Shwari disbursements fell 3%. 

NCBA is in the middle of a change of control, with the Central Bank of Kenya approving Nedbank’s acquisition of a 66% stake at the end of August 2026. Loop remains, from my own years of use, a very good mobile banking app, but on the evidence of the launch Absa Next is attempting a wider job: consumer, merchant and agent, credit, savings and investment, group banking and open banking in a single product open to anyone. Whether it does all of that as well as Loop does its narrower job is what I intend to find out.

The Rest Of The Banks Have Not Been Standing Still

Absa’s claim that Absa Next is Kenya’s first integrated digital financial solution needs qualifying, because Kenya has 39 licensed commercial banks and 259 licensed digital credit providers as of April 2026, and several of the banks have been building towards the same destination. KCB’s Vooma wallet has been open to non-KCB customers with a phone number and an ID for years, on all three mobile networks, with interest on balances and instant loans. Equity, which now says 89.7% of its customers bank digitally, lets you open an account inside Equity Mobile and has offered group approval features for chamas on Equitel since 2019. Co-operative Bank relaunched its app in October 2025 with selfie-based account opening and a youth account for 18 to 35 year olds. Stanbic put a money market fund and direct Treasury bill and bond purchases inside its app in July 2025. Family Bank’s PesaPap has lent to non-customers since 2018.

What none of them has done, as far as I can tell, is put all of it in one place, open the front door to anyone with an ID, and add a merchant and agent layer. Absa Next is not the first Kenyan bank app to do any one of these things. It may be the first to attempt all of them at once. That is a more accurate claim and the one I would encourage Absa to make.

The M-PESA Question

Any conversation about digital financial services in Kenya ends up at M-PESA, and Absa Next invites the comparison more directly than most because of who is now sponsoring it at group level. The scale gap is not close. In the year to March 2026 Safaricom reported M-PESA revenue of KES 182.7 billion, 46.4 billion transactions worth KES 41.68 trillion, 39.9 million 30-day active customers, 2.1 million Pochi la Biashara merchants and 1 million Lipa na M-PESA merchants. Fuliza disbursed KES 1.47 trillion to 17.7 million users. The Ziidi and Mali wealth products hold KES 21 billion for 2.2 million customers, and Safaricom folded the M-PESA app into My OneApp in April this year, a move I wrote about at the time as a brilliant strategy undermined by poor execution.

Absa Next is not going to displace any of that, and nobody at Absa suggested it would. What it can do is compete on the margins where M-PESA is weakest. A savings product paying up to 7% and a promised investment product paying up to 16% are both well above what Fuliza and M-Shwari customers earn today, and Ziidi’s money market fund is currently yielding around 6.85% gross, which ranks it near the bottom of the Kenyan fund league table. Instant credit from KES 500 to KES 1 million scored on affordability rather than airtime and M-PESA history is a different proposition from Fuliza’s KES 70,000 overdraft with its daily fees. Also, if Absa can get its 8,000 agents active on the app, it will have a physical cash-in cash-out network that no fintech in Kenya has. The realistic ambition is not to beat M-PESA but to become the account where a young M-PESA user keeps the money they want to grow rather than the money they want to spend, and that is a fight worth having.

Where The Numbers Need Scrutiny

The Central Bank Rate is currently 8.75% and the 91-day Treasury bill cleared at 8.78% on 24th September, while the average commercial bank deposit rate was 6.84% in June, according to the CBK. Savings of up to 7% on a bank account is therefore competitive against what banks pay, and roughly in line with a Treasury bill after withholding tax, but it is not exceptional. 

The 16% is another matter. The best-performing money market funds in Kenya were yielding around 11% gross at the end of September, with the market average at 9.18%, and the 364-day Treasury bill is at 9.04%. A return of up to 16% sits roughly five percentage points above the best money market fund in the country, and Absa has not yet said which product will deliver it, over what period, or with what risk. One of the launch reports suggested the figure depends on tenure and risk profile. Until the investment products are live and the fact sheets are published, I would treat 16% as a marketing number.

The same goes for credit. Nothing in the launch materials, on stage or in the app store listings discloses the interest rate or facility fee on Absa Next’s instant loans. Timiza charges a 5% facilitation fee plus monthly interest on 30-day money, Fuliza charges a 1% access fee plus daily maintenance, and Loop’s unsecured loans are priced around 14.1% a year plus fees. Absa Next’s pricing is the first thing a financial analyst will ask about and the one thing the bank did not share. 

Two regulatory points also matter. The CBK’s draft consumer protection framework, published in March, would require documented affordability checks before any loan, which fits what Absa Next is already doing but will squeeze the sub-KES 500 end of the market. Kenya also does not yet have a mandated open banking framework, so Absa Next’s aggregation of accounts held at other institutions is running ahead of the regulation rather than on it. 

However, that may change: the draft National Payment System Bill published this week would require payment providers to share customer data with licensed third parties once customers consent, which would make what Absa Next does today a great deal easier for everyone tomorrow. 

Finally, the Play Store listing references the Pngme software development kit for credit scoring, and some early reviewers complained about mandatory selfie-video identity verification. A three-field onboarding is the front door, not the whole KYC chain, and users should expect to be asked for more before they borrow.

No Finish Line: The Agile Rollout

The thing about the launch that impressed me most is also the thing that makes it hardest to review. Absa Next is being rolled out in an agile manner, which means the bank will keep iterating, with monthly and even weekly updates. 

Sitoyo Lopokoiyit said the difference between what he tested in March and what launched on yesterday was amazing, and that what is coming next is more amazing still, with drops over the next few weeks and continuously after that. Yusuf Omari made the same point: because it is a digital solution the bank can be agile, tweak and introduce new propositions as customers ask for them. 

Effectively, there is no finish line, even after the official launch. Design thinking is evident throughout, and Absa Next has clearly been co-created with customers as well as a broad range of employees within Absa in Kenya, in a way I have not seen a Kenyan bank do quite so openly. 

My First Impressions of Absa Next

I have installed Absa Next but I have not yet used it fully. That being said, what I can say is what the launch demonstrated. Absa Bank Kenya has built, in a deliberately separate incubator, a digital financial services proposition that is closer to a neobank than to a mobile banking app; it has opened that product to anyone with a Kenyan ID; it has designed it with and for a generation that currently banks with Safaricom; it has a group sponsor who spent six years running M-PESA across Africa; and it has committed, publicly, to iterate without end. Those are five things I have not seen any Kenyan bank line up at once.

Against that, the 16% is not live, the loan pricing is undisclosed, the relationship with Timiza is unexplained, the first-in-Kenya claim is quite possibly overstated, and every one of Absa’s rivals has been building towards the same destination. The Kenyan market does not need another app. It might, however, need this one, if Absa Next turns out to be as different in use as it was on stage. I will be using it from next week and will report back. Only time will tell whether Absa has disrupted itself before somebody else did, but yesterday morning, in a room full of bankers talking like a fintech, it at least looked like it was trying.