Equity Bank Subsidiary: Equity Bank Group is ready to acquire a local lender. This has been revealed by the bank’s chief executive officer Dr. James Mwangi. According to Dr. Mwangi, Equity has trained its eyes on the local bank and is waiting for a prospective acquisition market.
Dr. Mwangi said the prospective acquisition is part of the bank’s reviewed approach for its growth in the local market. The move will come barely months after Equity acquired a 66.5 percent stake in the Belgium’s BCDC. In 2020, the bank also acquired a 7.7 percent stake in Equity Bank Congo (EBC) from German sovereign wealth fund KfW at Sh. 996 million bringing it shareholding in EBC to 94.3 percent. Equity’s EBC operations were merged to form EquityBCDC.
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This helped the lender to beat the Kenya Commercial Bank and become the the first Kenyan lender to cross the Sh. 1 trillion valuation mark by assets. Currently, Equity Bank is the biggest lender in the region with assets of up to Sh. 1.2 trillion as at six months to June 2021.
On its prospective Kenyan ventures and acquisitions, Dr. Mwangi however did not reveal the local lender Equity was targeting.
“Instead of acquiring, we chose to be more innovative and attractive. Equity is investing heavily in digitization so that we can acquire the youth by giving them very strong devices like apps and USSD capabilities of banking. This is how we have chosen to grow,” he said.
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“However, if there are opportunities that are worth looking at, we could do it because we have done that in DRC that helped us quickly grew. We are now at 27 percent of market share in DRC while our organic growth is still 15 percent in Kenya,” he added.
