If you’ve walked into an Equity Bank branch, you are intimately familiar with the setup. You take your queue ticket, look up at the expansive row of teller windows, and notice a familiar scene: ten fully equipped desks, but only three or four actual human beings working them. And, right on cue, one of those tellers will mysteriously grab a stack of papers and disappear into a back room, leaving a couple of employees to battle the growing line.
It can be annoying when it happens to you. But as it turns out, it is likely a deliberate corporate strategy by the bank.
While investors are busy popping champagne over the hefty KES 75.5 billion profit for FY2025, a closer look at the data buried in the announcement finally explains the empty desks at your local banking hall.
The 88% digital reality
According to Equity Group CEO Dr. James Mwangi, physical branches now handle a microscopic fraction of the bank’s total volume. The corporate speak calls it institutionalised self-service, but the numbers speak for themselves.
“Today, 88% of all customer transactions are conducted digitally, and when you include our merchants and agents, 98.2% of transactions take place outside our branches,” Dr. Mwangi noted during the release of the FY2025 results. “This means our branch network handles just 1.8% of total transactions, a clear demonstration of the depth of our digitisation and the operational efficiencies it enables.”
Those operational efficiencies are exactly why you only see two tellers. Equity Bank knows that almost everyone is transacting via the Equity Mobile app, USSD, or Equitel. From a business standpoint, staffing a full row of tellers who might sit idle for hours simply doesn’t justify the payroll. Why pay ten people when 98.2% of the work is happening in the cloud and at local agent kiosks?
Our investment in technology continues to deliver strong results. The surge in digital transactions we witnessed during the COVID period has not only been sustained, it has returned to those peak levels. Today, 88% of all customer transactions are conducted digitally, and when you include our merchants and agents, 98.2% of transactions take place outside our branches. This means our branch network handles just 1.8% of total transactions, a clear demonstration of the depth of our digitisation and the operational efficiencies it enables. This level of adoption is central to strengthening our cost‑to‑income ratio and driving a more efficient, scalable business model. Dr. James Mwangi - Equity Group Managing Director & CEO
When efficiency meets reality
On paper, this hyper-efficient, highly scalable business model is brilliant. It is the exact reason their cost-to-income ratio looks so good to shareholders. But on the ground, the reality of the 1.8% is a little less graceful.
I’ve experienced this bottleneck at multiple branches across the region. The system works perfectly fine on a quiet Tuesday morning. But the moment there is a sudden, unexpected surge in customer visits at the end of the month or back-to-school moments when everyone is scrambling to pay school fees, those two or three lonely tellers get completely overwhelmed.
When digital channels hiccup, that 1.8% quickly swells. Suddenly, the skeleton crew left to man the banking hall is facing a tidal wave of frustrated customers, leading to agonizingly long wait times just to clear a cheque or replace a card.
Equity Bank has clearly mastered the digital transition, and raking in billions in profit while digitizing the bulk of their services is a massive win for the company. They have successfully trained Kenyans to bank from their phones. But for those rare days when the digital magic fails, or when a transaction strictly requires an in-person visit, it would be nice if that disappearing teller stayed at their desk just a little bit longer.
