36.3 Million Accounts, One Big Dream: How NCBA Is Turning Everyday Banking Into a Platform for Kenyan Ambition

CBK’s 2025 data puts NCBA at 45.0% of commercial-bank deposit accounts. Behind that headline is a deeper story about scale, inclusion, and what it means for a Kenyan starting small but planning to grow big.

Kenya’s banking numbers are often presented in millions, percentages and dense regulatory tables, but the story inside the Central Bank of Kenya’s 2025 figures is surprisingly human. NCBA Bank Kenya closed December 2025 with 36,313,817 deposit accounts, up from 33,087,517 a year earlier. That is an increase of 3,226,300 accounts in twelve months, or about 9.8 percent. Read plainly, the bank added the equivalent of roughly 8,840 deposit accounts for every day of the year. The figure does not mean 36.3 million different people bank with NCBA, because one customer can hold more than one account, but it does show something important about reach: millions of financial relationships are sitting on NCBA’s rails, and the absolute number kept growing even as the wider commercial-banking account count moved sharply in the opposite direction.

The most striking number is not simply 36.3 million; it is the share behind it. CBK’s market-share appendix assigns NCBA 45.0 percent of all commercial-bank deposit accounts in 2025, the largest account-count share in the system. That does not make NCBA Kenya’s biggest bank on every measure: KCB remained first on the regulator’s overall market-share index, while NCBA ranked fourth at 7.9 percent. The distinction matters. Total assets, value of deposits, capital and account volumes answer different questions. NCBA’s leadership here is about the breadth of account access, not a claim that it tops every balance-sheet league table. For an ordinary customer, however, breadth matters because it signals that the institution is operating at mass-market scale rather than as a narrow bank for a small circle of wealthy clients.

The composition of those accounts makes the inclusion story even clearer. Of NCBA’s 36,313,817 deposit accounts at the end of 2025, 36,268,400 were in the below-KSh500,000 balance bracket, while 45,417 were above KSh500,000. In other words, about 99.9 percent of the recorded accounts sat below the half-million-shilling threshold. That should not be confused with poverty, inactivity or account quality; the table does not tell us how frequently each account is used or what income the holder earns. What it does tell us is that NCBA’s account base is overwhelmingly built around ordinary-sized balances. The picture is therefore not of a bank whose doors are reserved for people who have already “made it,” but of a bank whose reach extends deeply into the everyday financial lives of households, workers, traders and small businesses.

Figure 1. NCBA total deposit accounts: 30.44M (2023), 33.09M (2024), 36.31M (2025). Two-year increase: 19.3%.

Source: Central Bank of Kenya, Bank Supervision Annual Reports 2024 and 2025. CBK 2025 Annual Report

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A powerful trend also underlies the snapshot. NCBA’s total deposit accounts were 30,436,166 in 2023, rose to 33,087,517 in 2024 and then climbed again to 36,313,817 in 2025. Across those two years, that is growth of about 19.3 percent, with annual increases of roughly 8.7 percent and 9.8 percent respectively. A bank can advertise ambition, but sustained account growth is a harder signal because it has to appear in audited and regulatory data. The three-year line points in one direction: NCBA is recording are account relationships each year. For a reader trying to understand what scale looks like, the simplest interpretation is that the bank is not standing still. Its platform has continued to absorb new financial relationships while preserving a very large base from one reporting year to the next.

The wider banking table also needs careful reading because 2025 was not a normal-looking year for reported account volumes. Commercial banks as a group fell from 114,244,211 deposit accounts in 2024 to 80,676,276 in 2025, a decline of about 29.4 percent. The largest single movement in the table is KCB Bank Kenya, whose reported total dropped from 53,688,652 to 12,375,104, a r