The Airtel fraternity will miss the courage of Anne Kinuthia-Otieno, the founding chief executive of its mobile money division, Airtel Money Kenya.

Ms Kinuthia-Otieno is exiting the corner office at Airtel Money, ending a short but eventful stint during which she took on Safaricom’s M-Pesa and managed to carve out a slice of the mobile money market from the dominant player’s tight grip.

She has been appointed Visa’s vice-president and regional manager for East Africa, marking another milestone in her long career in finance as she now trains her eyes on cross-border payments.

Her move to Visa comes after a period in which she helped strengthen Airtel Money’s position in a market long dominated by M-Pesa.

Ms Kinuthia-Otieno cut her teeth in fintech in the banking halls of Barclays Bank, now Absa, at a time when banks were known more for bricks-and-mortar banking than mobile services, before being appointed the first chief executive of Airtel Money Kenya as a standalone business in 2022.

At the time, it was banks that were challenging for a piece of the billion’s digital money. Financial services still revolved around branches, paperwork and face-to-face interactions that excluded a large section of the informal economy.

She endeavoured to change this through the various roles she held at Absa, including Director of Governance and Controls, Sales and Distribution Director, Products Director, and Head of SME Banking.

At Absa, she was involved in developing the bank’s first mobile digital wallet, allowing customers to open accounts and access services through their phones.

But her biggest test in pushing the frontiers of financial inclusion came when she joined Airtel Money in October 2022.

She has since admitted that the four years at the helm of what she once described as a “challenger brand” have been “blood, sweat and tears.”

“Growing the brand is difficult, especially in a market where there's a dominant player and so that keeps me awake at night, thinking about what we can do to create impact and make a difference,” she said in a past interview, two years into the job.

It is her stewardship of Airtel Money’s battle to claw back market share from M-Pesa, after years of failed attempts, that has remarkably defined Ms Kinuthia’s legacy.

She might not have succeeded in upending M-Pesa’s dominant position, which still commands nearly 90 percent of the market, but she has sent a strong message to the competitor.

Airtel Money has since strengthened its market share to 10.9 percent as of March 2026, while M-Pesa’s share has fallen to 89.1 percent from its near-total dominance four years ago.

In four years, Airtel Money has grown its subscriber base more than five-fold, from 1.1 million in June 2022 to about 5.8 million by March 2026, as its market share climbed from 3.1 percent.

“People often assume that competing with a dominant market leader is purely about market share. Whilst that is important, I also saw it differently,” she says.

“One of the things I’m proudest of is that Airtel Money became a stronger and more credible participant in Kenya’s payments ecosystem. We demonstrated that healthy competition benefits consumers, merchants and the broader economy,” she adds.

Besides her tenacity, she has the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) to thank for the achievement, which has seen Airtel Money more than triple its market share.

CBK not only pushed for mobile-money services to be hived off from traditional telecommunications services; it also pushed for interoperability, allowing customers to seamlessly send money across different mobile-money platforms.

“The interoperability made possible with the help of the regulator, after five years, has enabled our customers to pay our bills online through the competitor’s paybill number,” she said in the June 2024 interview.

For years, Airtel Kenya reckoned that its fighting chance lay in having M-Pesa separated from the other telecommunications services offered by Safaricom to level the playing field.

Indeed, Airtel appeared to have given up on mobile money, believing its fighting chance lay in telecommunications services—calling, texting and browsing.

But Airtel honchos saw M-Pesa as the proposition that kept customers locked into Safaricom’s network.

In Airtel’s view, competing against Safaricom was difficult because subscribers were somehow ensnared by the “pull” of M-Pesa, with customers remaining on the network even when Airtel tried to lure them with lower call and SMS charges.

However, regulators and legislators pushed back, arguing that splitting M-Pesa, or declaring Safaricom dominant, would amount to punishing success.

But this changed when the CBK came into the picture, insisting on the separation of mobile money services from the other telco services in line with the requirements of the National Payment System Act, 2011.

The financial regulator said separating mobile money from telecommunications services would make it easier to regulate the sector and insulate mobile-money businesses from shocks that might emerge from other services.

CBK licensed Airtel Money as a Payment Service Provider on January 21, 2022, and granted it a transition period to complete the separation.

Six months later, Airtel Networks Kenya spun off its mobile money business into a separately run entity following the entry of minority shareholders into the venture.

Safaricom is yet to complete its separation of the mobile money unit, with reports that the move has been hampered by a Sh75 billion tax liability that will materialise after the spinoff.

The spinoff of Airtel Money came after London-listed Airtel Africa Plc sold a 25.77 percent stake in its local mobile money business as part of a continental deal that saw it raise $550 million (Sh65.2 billion) from four institutional investors.

The multinational’s interest in Airtel Money Kenya dropped to 74.23 percent in the year ended March from 100 percent a year earlier.

However, both Airtel Networks and Airtel Money remain subsidiaries of the Dubai-based Airtel Africa.

Airtel Money had operated for years but struggled to convert its presence into meaningful competition against M-Pesa’s overwhelming scale.

Ms Kinuthia-Otieno’s initial challenge when she joined the new organisation was not market share, but confidence. After years of operating in the shadow of a dominant rival, the organisation’s confidence was at its lowest ebb.

“We focused on strengthening partnerships, creating an agent network, creating visibility in the market, improving customer experience, investing in operational resilience and building a culture where innovation and execution go hand in hand,” she said.

Rather than making M-Pesa the centre of every decision, she said she pushed Airtel Money toward understanding customers, agents and partners and identifying problems competitors were not addressing.

“I wanted us instead to become obsessed with our customers, understanding their frustrations, identifying opportunities others weren't addressing and building solutions around those needs.”

Under her reign, the company strengthened its agent network and partnerships at a time Kenya’s payments industry was simultaneously moving toward greater interoperability between competing platforms.

Interoperability reduced some of the friction that had historically tied customers to individual mobile-money networks, giving smaller operators greater scope to compete.

“We worked really well with the regulator and I really must thank the CBK for their incredible support especially in driving interoperability,” she says.

→kmwangi@ke.nationmedia.com