NCBA Group has posted a profit after tax of KES 23.4 billion for the full year ending December 2025, a 7 percent increase from KES 21.9 billion the previous year. The headline numbers are solid. But three things buried beneath the surface make these results more interesting than the press release lets on.
The headline numbers
Profit before tax came in at KES 27.9 billion, up 10.9 percent year on year. Operating income grew 17 percent to KES 73.3 billion, driven largely by the group’s digital lending engine and stronger corporate banking activity. Total assets crossed KES 716 billion, up 8 percent, while customer deposits grew 6 percent to KES 532 billion.
For context: at half-year 2025, total assets were KES 663 billion and deposits sat at KES 497 billion, meaning NCBA added significant balance sheet weight in the second half of the year.
The dividend announcement is generous. Shareholders will receive a total of KES 7.10 per share for 2025, with the full-year payout pool reaching KES 11.7 billion, up from KES 9.1 billion in 2024. That is a 29 percent jump in total distributions, against profit growth of only 7 percent. The payout ratio has clearly expanded. That is not a red flag on its own, but it is a data point worth noting, particularly given the pending Nedbank transaction (more on that shortly).
Digital lending is the real engine
The number that stands out most in these results is KES 1.4 trillion in digital loans disbursed across the year, a 33 percent increase year on year. To put that in perspective: NCBA’s entire balance sheet of total assets is KES 716 billion. The group is cycling almost double that amount annually through mobile and digital credit channels. This is not a side product.
NCBA’s digital business, which includes its mobile lending operations across Sub-Saharan Africa in partnership with telcos, now contributes 32 percent of group profitability, with a profit before tax of KES 9.0 billion. The group has positioned itself as the largest digital lender in the region by volume, and these numbers support that claim.
The provision spike that deserves attention
One figure the press release mentions without elaboration is the 46.3 percent jump in provisions for credit losses, which reached KES 8.0 billion for the full year. At half-year, provisions were KES 3.2 billion, up 19.1 percent. The sharp acceleration in the second half of the year, to roughly KES 4.8 billion, is the kind of detail that quietly reveals stress in a loan book even when headline profits look clean.
Provisions are set aside when banks expect some portion of their loans to go bad. A jump of this scale, especially in a digital lending portfolio where individual loans are small but volumes are enormous, suggests either rising default rates, a more conservative provisioning posture ahead of a major ownership change, or both. The press release does not explain the reason. Readers who followed NCBA’s H1 2025 results, which Tech-ish covered in September, will recall the NPL ratio then stood at 11.9 percent. The full-year figure has not been disclosed in this release, and that omission is worth flagging.
The efficiency question
Both operating income and operating expenses grew at exactly 17 percent. That means the cost-to-income ratio is unchanged from 2024, sitting at roughly 51 percent. For a bank that spent five years executing a transformation strategy anchored partly on digital efficiency, flat cost discipline is a reasonable outcome, but not a triumphant one.
The Nedbank backdrop
These results land at an unusual moment in NCBA’s history. As we reported in January, South Africa’s Nedbank Group formally offered to acquire approximately 66 percent of NCBA’s shares for a total consideration of around R13.9 billion, structured as 20 percent cash and 80 percent Nedbank shares listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority granted a regulatory waiver in February 2026 allowing Nedbank to proceed with a partial acquisition without triggering a mandatory full takeover offer.
Shareholders representing 77.54 percent of NCBA have already accepted the offer, well above what Nedbank needs to secure a controlling position. The deal is expected to close by the third quarter of 2026. If it does, these full-year 2025 results will likely be among the last NCBA reports as a fully independent Kenyan bank, though the group will retain its NSE listing and local brand under the agreed structure.
If completed, NCBA will remain listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, with 34 percent of shares continuing to trade publicly. Nedbank has stated NCBA will retain its brand, local leadership, and operational independence, at least initially.
The new strategy
NCBA is entering this transition with a new five-year plan in hand. The group’s 2026 to 2030 “Ubuntu Strategy,” named after the southern African philosophy of collective humanity, is built around four pillars: strengthening its core banking reliability, scaling high-growth segments like wealth management, SMEs, and insurance, expanding into new markets, and building what the group calls a future-ready operating culture.
The strategy’s tagline, “Banking on Belief,” is marketing language, but the underlying priorities reflect real commercial logic. Wealth management and insurance are higher-margin, capital-light businesses where NCBA is underweighted relative to its size. The investment banking arm crossed KES 100 billion in assets under management in 2025. NCBA Insurance posted an 82 percent jump in profit before tax to KES 306 million, its first full year as a fully integrated subsidiary.
What this means
For ordinary NCBA customers across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ivory Coast, the most relevant detail from these results is the bank’s digital lending scale and continued branch growth, now at 123 across the region, up from 89 in 2020.
For investors, the FY 2025 results confirm strong underlying profitability but also raise legitimate questions about accelerating credit losses and a dividend payout that has grown faster than earnings. For the broader Kenyan banking market, NCBA’s pending integration into a South African banking group continues a consolidation trend that has reshaped the sector over the past decade.
Kenyan banking, it turns out, is not done changing shape.
