Four years ago, Equity Group embarked on a journey of transformation. The journey was not one of incremental change or optimizing the business, but one of self-disruption and complete transformation. Nothing, including the core, the true north, corporate beliefs and philosophies, and culture, has been spared.
The vision has remained socio-economic transformation, but has now significantly evolved. The purpose has pivoted from financial inclusion to giving dignity and changing lives while expanding opportunities for wealth creation to championing, catalyzing, and facilitating private sector-led development financing.
Knowing Equity could not own the development of a continent, the Group has collaboratively led to the development of the ‘Marshall-like plan’ for the continent; The Africa Recovery and Resilience Plan (ARRP), which has informed disruption and transformation of the Group to strategically position it to provide African Leadership.
The Group has developed and mapped its 2030 strategic plan to anchor the ARRP with an ambition to have a presence in 15 countries and serve a hundred million customers by 2030. This ambition has necessitated the disruption and transformation of the core pillars, enablers, and critical success factors. Governance and leadership have been overhauled to provide adequacy of capacity, competence, transparency, and openness necessary for the ambition. Systems and infrastructure have been fully replaced with scalable next-generation, 4th industrial revolution technologies that are digital, machine learning, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI), and data analytics ready and enabled. Applications that can leverage the capabilities of the systems and infrastructure with inbuilt enhanced security and innovations are being deployed. To go-to-market strategy has been developed for the roll-out to transform the capabilities of a modern product house into customer value propositions and solutions for a segmented market on the basis of industries, sectors, segments, demographics, and customer-specific status. The Group’s organizational culture is transforming to have built-in customer centricity and market responsiveness on core values of integrity, professionalism, creativity, innovation, and teamwork for a fit-for-purpose human capital and to attract and retain talented, skilled, and experienced staff.
Commenting on the Half Year 2025 performance, Equity Group Managing Director and CEO, Dr. James Mwangi said, “The execution of the strategic business plan has started to reflect on the balance sheet and performance of the Group in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, trade and investment, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that populate the eco-systems of the formal sector in these value chains and is likely to significantly and increasingly transform the structure and performance of the Group. Continued execution has resulted in transformation of the balance sheet structure and the resultant profit and loss structure, creating resilience in performance.”
Group profit after tax grew by 17% to Kshs 34.6 billion, up from 29.6 billion year on year, driven by a 9% growth in net interest income after an 18% decline in interest expense. Total costs declined by 2% driven by a 34% reduction in loan loss provisions.
The Group has also bounced back to record a 4% growth in loan book to Kshs 825.1 billion despite the challenging global, regional, and local macroeconomic environment characterized by uncertainty, depressed GDP, growth rates, high interest rates, volatile exchange rates, and high inflation. Customer deposits registered a 2% growth to Kshs 1.32 trillion, and total assets grew by 3% to reach Kshs.1.8 trillion.
The loan deposit ratio remains favourable at 62.5% signifying headroom in lending which could be supported by strong capital buffers of 16.5% and 18.1% for both core capital to risk weighted assets and total capital to risk weighted assets respectively and a liquidity ratio of 58.6% confirming the opportunity for asset reallocation from cash and cash equivalent assets to higher yielding loan assets.
The four-year Group business transformation journey has started to deliver consistent quarter-on-quarter improvements. The Group has registered the strongest quarterly performance in Q2 2025 of Kshs.22.9 billion and Q1 2025 of Kshs. 18.6 billion, both above the quarterly average for the last 4 years, of Kshs.14.8 billion despite the muted loan book growth, geopolitical uncertainty, and impact of culture, governance, systems, people, customer value proposition, and the transformation the Group is undertaking.
The recovery and building up of resilience is evident in every business. Equity Bank Kenya has seen its net interest margin rise to 7.5% from 6.5%, return on assets rise to 3.9% up from 2.8% and return on equity jump to 28.1% from 25%. Equity Bank Tanzania has seen its net interest margin rise to 8.7% up from 8.1%, return on assets rise to 4% from 2.3% and return on Equity grow to 27% from 17.5% year on year. Equity Bank Uganda has seen its return on assets jump to 3.4% from 2.2% and return on equity grow to 25.1% from 17.1%. Equity EBCD has seen its net interest margin rise to 7.1% from 6.9%, return on assets grow to 3.1% from 2.6% and return on equity grow to 23.5% from 21.9% while Equity Bank Rwanda has achieved the highest return on assets of 4.1% and a return on equity of 29.6% and a cost to income ratio of 35.8%.