Safaricom has made Boniface Mungania its Chief Financial Services Officer, the executive in charge of M-PESA and the money products built on it. The appointment took effect on 1st November 2026 and Safaricom announced it on 6th November. He reports directly to the chief executive, Peter Ndegwa.
Mungania has been doing the job since Esther Waititu left at the end of July. At the time, Safaricom named him interim Chief Financial Services Officer until it appointed a substantive replacement. When we covered her resignation, we asked whether that replacement would come from inside the company or from banking. It turned out to be him.
Safaricom’s announcement mentions neither that interim stint nor the one before it. Mungania was also acting in this role from mid-2022. That time, Safaricom went outside and hired Waititu, a career banker, from KCB. She started in February 2023, and from 1st April 2023 he became Director of Public Sector Digital Transformation.
The title sounds like chief financial officer, which is a different job. This one runs M-PESA and what sits on top of it: the Fuliza overdraft, M-Shwari and KCB M-PESA savings and loans, and the Ziidi investment product. It’s a big seat. In the six months to September, M-PESA brought in KES 100.07 billion, which is 46.3% of the money Safaricom’s Kenyan business makes from its services. In Kenya, 42.31 million customers had used it in the past month by the end of September, and over the six months it moved KES 23.56 trillion.
Mungania has been at Safaricom since 2007, when he joined as a Customer Care Representative. He then moved through Senior Manager for M-PESA Business Development, a consulting stint on mobile money at Vodafone Qatar, Head of M-PESA Products and Services Development, and Payments Tribe Lead, a Safaricom title for the head of a payments team.
His last job took him out of M-PESA and into government work, where his brief was to build partnerships with national and county governments. Safaricom credits him with nationwide projects in agriculture, healthcare, small business and public finance, and with work on APIs, the connectors that let one system talk to another, as well as digital identity and national payment systems. It doesn’t name the projects. It also says he has the Order of the Grand Warrior, a Kenyan state honour, without saying when he received it. He has a Bachelor of Science degree and is studying for a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.
The appointment came “following receipt of all relevant regulatory approvals”, but Safaricom doesn’t say which regulator or when it applied. We think that means the Central Bank of Kenya. It lists Safaricom as an authorised payment service provider, and the payment rules say it “shall assess and approve” the “senior managers in control” of such a provider.
If you use M-PESA, nothing changes for you because of this. The announcement has no new fees or products in it. What Mungania inherits is a business that’s growing while bringing in less on each transaction. Our look at the half-year results showed M-PESA revenue up 13.6% while transactions grew 25.2%, so Safaricom now brings in about KES 3.65 a transaction, down from about KES 4.03. Much of that growth is small Fuliza draws averaging KES 192.
He also takes the seat four months after Vodacom took majority control of Safaricom. We think picking someone who came up through M-PESA, and has stood in at the top of it twice, is the low-risk choice for a unit bringing in close to half of Kenya’s service revenue. The first full set of numbers on his watch comes with the full-year results in May 2027.
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