Safaricom’s chief financial services officer, Esther Waititu, will leave the company at the end of July, becoming the third senior executive to exit Kenya’s largest telecommunications company in five months.
“I wish to announce that Esther Waititu, our chief financial services officer, will be leaving Safaricom to pursue other opportunities,” Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa said in an internal email to employees seen by TechCabal.
Waititu’s last day will be July 31, according to the email. Safaricom has appointed Boniface Mungania, its Director of Public Sector Digital Transformation, as interim chief financial services officer.
The departure marks another leadership change at the executive level overseeing Safaricom’s financial services ambitions. In late March, Sitoyo Lopokoiyit stepped down as managing director of M-PESA Africa, while chief business development and strategy officer Michael Mutiga is leaving to become CEO of Stanbic Bank Kenya and South Sudan from August 1.
The three executives held roles central to Safaricom’s strategy of expanding beyond telecommunications into digital financial services. Their departures come as the company expands M-PESA beyond payments into savings, credit, and investments, while building the technology needed to support more transactions and third-party financial services.
Safaricom typically communicates executive departures internally unless they involve the chief executive, while publicly announcing senior appointments.
Waititu joined Safaricom in 2023 after more than a decade in banking. During her tenure, the company completed Fintech 2.0, the biggest overhaul of M-PESA’s core infrastructure since Safaricom moved the platform in-house in 2015.
Completed in September 2025, the migration moved M-PESA to a cloud-native architecture capable of processing 6,000 transactions per second at launch, replacing a system that was approaching its limit of 4,500 transactions per second. The upgrade also made it easier for Safaricom to introduce new services and for banks and fintech companies to connect to M-PESA.
In February, Safaricom launched Ziidi Trader, an M-PESA service that allows users to buy and sell shares listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE). The product gave M-PESA’s more than 37 million users a direct route into the stock market and marked another step in Safaricom’s expansion into investment products.
Before joining Safaricom, Waititu served as KCB Group’s Director of Corporate Banking from September 2021 to February 2023, and previously held several roles at Standard Bank.
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