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Deposit-taking saccos beat banks in the race for new deposits
Nation DT Sacco exhibition tents during the 103rd Ushirika Day celebrations at Kenyatta International Convention Centre (KICC), Nairobi on July 12, 2025.Â
Photo credit: Wilfred Nyangaresi | Nation Media Group
Members’ savings in deposit-taking (DT) saccos grew by 13.6 percent to Sh651.83 billion last year, defying the environment in which savings in commercial banks and microfinanciers dropped.
Latest data from the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) shows the 176 DT saccos in the country, saw a combined rise in deposits from Sh573.64 billion they held in the previous year amid a tough economic environment that weakened many households’ ability to save.
The CBK bulletin shows while saccos received Sh78.19 billion additional deposits, the 39 commercial banks posted a rare decline, with the stock of deposits falling by 0.85 percent or Sh42.87 billion to Sh5.011 trillion. Some banks partly blamed the fall in their deposits on revaluation of dollar-denominated deposits.
During the same period, the 14 micro-finance banks under CBK supervision continued losing deposits, with the figure falling by Sh694 million or 1.63 percent to Sh41.92 billion.
This suggests that the micro-lenders who in 2023 lost 105,358 deposit accounts continued to lose their allure.
The DT-saccos, which are under the supervision of Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority (Sasra), enjoyed the growth in deposits despite previous reports showing a rise in dormant members, as a result of challenges such as layoffs and higher cost of living. In the prior year, DT-saccos’ deposits had grown by 9.8 percent.
Kenyans have over the past two years been hit with compulsory State deductions towards affordable housing, social healthcare and retirement savings, hurting their ability to save in banks and saccos, as other factors such as inflation also ate into their earnings.
The continued growth in sacco deposits amid decline in banks and microfinance banks suggests that saccos continued with the momentum registered in 2023, where a Sasra report showed accounts with more than Sh100,000 grew at the fastest pace in five years to hit 1.1 million.
The Sasra data combined the savings in DT saccos and large non-withdrawable deposit-taking saccos, both totalling 357. The data showed the accounts holding above Sh100,000 jumped by 99,000 to 1,107,000 in 2023 from 1,008,000 in the previous year.
The additional 99,000 high-value accounts marked the fastest jump since Sasra started disclosing the data. The growth was from 97,000 added in the previous year and 60,000 and 41,000 that had been added in 2021 and 2020 respectively.
The growth for 2023 took accounts with above Sh100,000 as a share of total accounts to 7.57 percent from the previous year’s 6.94 percent, even as majority of accounts (89.7 percent or 13.12 million) held less than Sh50,000.
In terms of value, the 1.1 million accounts held Sh513.48 billion deposits or 89.28 percent of all the Sh575.18 billion deposits in the Sasra-regulated Saccos. This left 13.12 million accounts with Sh34.59 billion and 399,000 accounts with Sh27.11 billion, pointing to the concentration of deposits in less than 10 percent of the accounts.
