Equity hires more expatriates in fresh executive shake-up

Equity Bank has increased the number of expatriate executives in the latest management shake-up at the lender.

The bank Wednesday announced the appointment of four new executives including three expatriates —Enrico Nora (general manager, mobile banking), Ron Reddick (executive director services) and Raphael Hukai (chief information officer).

This raises the number of Equity’s expatriate executives to five including the lender’s South African CFO, John Staley and the investment banking head, Jumaane Tafawa.

This is a shift from Equity’s earlier strategy of hiring Kenyan executives from the diaspora and working for multinationals such as Standard Chartered Plc and France based BNP Paribas.

“We are not timid to go in the global market to look for people to help us exploit our competencies and we are now a global bank,” chief executive James Mwangi said Wednesday.

The bank has also tapped Reuben Mbindu as human resources director from Standard Chartered Bank where he held a similar position.

Mr Hukai joins the bank from IBM where he worked for 16 years as executive architect while Mr Nora was CFO of a division of NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s top mobile phone operator.

Other top banks including KCB, Co-operative and Barclays have preferred locals to man their executive suite. But NIC Bank, National Bank and Barclays have tapped Kenyans working abroad to steer their operations.

NIC in September hired John Gachora from Barclays Africa as managing director. Barclays got Jeremy Awori from Standard Chartered (Tanzania) while National Bank tapped Munir Ahmed Standard Chartered Bank in South Africa.

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 whom 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 the 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 and 40.82 per cent in October 2011.

This means that international investors now only need to buy shares equivalent to 0.64 per cent worth Sh787 million to own more than half of the bank, which would turn the lender into foreign-owned based on the Central Bank of Kenya classification.

Its share has shed 3.65 per cent over the past three months to Sh33.25.