Mr Reuben Mbindu. FILE
By GEORGE NGIGI
In Summary
- Equity bank has tapped Reuben Mbindu as human resources director from Standard Chartered Bank where he held a similar position.
- The also appointed Raphael Hukai to the position of chief information officer from IBM where he worked for 16 years as executive architect.
- The appointments were loaded on the bank’s website and are in line with Equity’s strategy of hiring executives from multi-national firms.
Equity Bank has raided IBM Corporation and rival Standard Chartered Bank in the latest executive shake-up at the lender.
The bank has tapped Reuben Mbindu as human resources director from Standard Chartered Bank where he held a similar position.
It has also appointed Raphael Hukai to the
position of chief information officer from IBM where he worked for 16
years as executive architect. Enrico Nora has been named to lead the
lender’s mobile banking unit.
The appointments were loaded on the bank’s website
and are in line with Equity’s strategy of hiring executives from
multi-national firms.
Hiring from international firms like Bank of
America, Standard Chartered and Microsoft has been informed by Equity’s
quest to deepen its presence in the corporate segment of the banking
market.
This has led to the recruitment of professionals
from the diaspora over the past five years, some of who have already
left the bank
.
.
The changes come months after Equity realigned its
executive suite following the exit of Samuel Makome, managing director
of its Tanzania subsidiary, Samson Oduor (CFO), and finance director
Collins Otiwu.
Mr Otiwu is now the chief financial officer at KCB Group where Mr Mukoma serves as the head of the bank’s Kenyan operations.
In the past seven years, Equity went to the
low-end of market borrowers that traditionally has been considered a
high risk venture and grew to become Kenya’s biggest bank by customer
base and the second largest by assets.
Now it has trained its sights on the small, but
highly lucrative, corporate debt market which has been dominated by a
few banks with capitalisation required to offer big loans. The bank has
extended multi-billion shilling credit to firms like Rift Valley
Railways and Kenya Power.
Human capital has become the most sought after
resource for market share growth in the local banking industry in which
business ideas are being copied with speed, sparking a talent war.
Equity has followed the hiring of top executives from multinational firms with heavy investments in IT.
The bank has also inched closer to becoming a
foreign lender as purchase of shares by investors outside Kenya nears
the 50 per cent mark.
Regulatory filings show that foreign investors
raised their stake in the bank to 49.36 per cent in November, up from 46
per cent in December 2012.
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