Safaricom names Caroline Wambugu Group Lead for Finance Controls, Performance and Investor Relations, adding controlling, treasury, tax and collections.

Safaricom has appointed Caroline Wambugu as Group Lead for Finance Controls, Performance and Investor Relations. The role is considerably wider than the one she has held since she joined the company. It now covers financial controlling, reporting, treasury, tax, shared services and credit collections.

Until this change, her title was Head of Financial Planning, Analysis and Investor Relations. That is how she introduced herself when she moderated Safaricom’s full-year results announcement in May 2025 and the half-year announcement in November 2025.

Who she is

Wambugu joined Safaricom in December 2021. Before that she was at Absa Bank Kenya, and before that at NIC Bank. Safaricom puts her experience at 24 years across banking and telecommunications. She is a certified public accountant of Kenya (CPA-K).

Safaricom’s finance function is led by Dilip Pal, Group Chief Finance and Innovation Officer since November 2020. In January this year, when Safaricom took up a corporate membership with CFO East Africa, that organisation listed the company’s senior finance leadership as three people: Pal, group financial controller Samuel Munyua, and Wambugu as head of FP&A and investor relations. Controlling and reporting now sit inside Wambugu’s brief.

Why the timing is interesting

The investor relations part of this job has just become a different job.

On 30 June, the Government of Kenya sold a 15% stake in Safaricom to Vodafone Kenya in a single block trade worth about KES 204.3 billion. We covered the completion of that deal and what it does to the share register. Vodacom now controls about 55% of Safaricom. The National Treasury holds 20%, down from 35%. Public investors hold the remaining 25%.

Then at the annual general meeting on 31 July, shareholders rewrote the company’s articles to convert that shareholding into governance rights. One of the approved changes makes the chief finance officer the automatic alternate director for the chief executive at board meetings.

Vodacom will now consolidate Safaricom into its own accounts line by line rather than booking only a share of the profit. In practice that means Safaricom’s reporting has to satisfy a Johannesburg-listed parent on the parent’s timetable and under the parent’s group accounting policies. At the same time, the pool of independent Kenyan shareholders that investor relations exists to serve has shrunk to a quarter of the register.

A run of departures

Safaricom has lost several senior people this year. Sitoyo Lopokoiyit left M-PESA Africa and became Absa’s chief executive for personal and private banking on 1 April. Michael Mutiga left to run Stanbic Bank Kenya from 1 August. Chief Financial Services Officer Esther Waititu resigned, with 31 July as her last working day, and Boniface Mungania is standing in on an interim basis.

What to watch

The first public test is the half-year results for the six months to 30 September 2026. Safaricom has announced its half-year figures in early November for several years running, and that announcement will be the first full reporting cycle under Wambugu’s expanded mandate, and the first set of half-year numbers prepared with Vodacom as majority owner. Watch whether the reporting calendar shifts to line up with Vodacom’s own, and whether Safaricom names a separate group financial controller or keeps controlling folded into this role.