What did it take to step away from the predictability of traditional banking and walk into the complexity of building financial systems that served millions across borders, platforms, and income levels?
For Esther Waititu, Chief Financial Services Officer at Safaricom, the answer was not a single decision but a series of deliberate, sometimes counterintuitive moves that shaped a career defined by scale, discipline, and reinvention.
Esther spoke on the Financially Incorrect podcast, where she traced a journey that began in traditional banking, moved through international markets in Zambia, and ultimately landed at the heart of one of Africa’s most influential financial ecosystems, Safaricom’s fast-evolving financial services division. It was a story of earnings that once ranged between KSh 9,000 and KSh 15,000 per month, of executive negotiations that went beyond salary, and of a financial philosophy forged as much by mistakes as by milestones.
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One of the defining moments in Esther’s career was not a promotion, but a step back. “There was a time I had to take a step down in the roles that I was doing,” she reflected. “I was managing a region, and then I stepped down to manage a country, and everyone was like, ‘Why would you do that? Your trajectory is only up.’”
In a professional culture that equated success with linear progression, Esther’s decision challenged the default narrative. The move expanded her leadership depth in ways that a purely upward climb could not. Growth, she suggested, was not always vertical.
Esther’s money story was deeply personal. As a firstborn, she grew up in a household where resources were shared, stretched, and creatively reallocated. Even hand-me-downs became formative lessons in financial perception. She recalled a moment with her younger sister who refused to go to school simply because she was tired of wearing Esther’s clothes. “Everyone else’s pleats were blue and crisp,” she said with a laugh, “mine were heading to sky blue with no pleats.”
Beyond humor lay a deeper pattern of early exposure to scarcity, responsibility, and negotiation of identity through resources.
Later in life, those lessons collided with ambition. “My mom kept insisting, instead of buying a car, why don’t you buy a property?” Esther said. “But my art, my sound system, and the car were more important than a house.”
It was a reflection she later viewed differently. The mistake was not consumption itself, but timing, priority, and the delayed recognition of compounding wealth.
As Esther moved into senior leadership across banking and fintech, the conversation around money shifted. Compensation was no longer about monthly earnings but about structure, equity, retention, and long-term alignment.
At executive level, she explained, salary was not necessarily linear. Instead, negotiations revolved around bonuses, deferred compensation, and retention structures that could only materialize years later. “You’re not just asking what you earn today,” she explained. “You’re asking what happens to what you’ve already earned, and how it follows you when you move.”
It was a nuanced world where leaving a job could mean leaving behind significant unvested wealth unless it was negotiated differently.
Much of Esther’s work sat at the intersection of technology, access, and behavioural finance. At Safaricom, she oversaw financial services that extended far beyond traditional banking infrastructure, driven by platforms like M-Pesa.
The shift was not only about digitization. It was about removing friction entirely. Customers no longer wanted to go somewhere to access financial services. They wanted services embedded in their daily lives within transactions, conversations, and consumption patterns.
This philosophy was visible in innovations such as shared wallets, automated savings tools, and micro-investment systems that allowed users to allocate money effortlessly as they spent. “If I bought a cup of coffee downstairs, 50 shillings could automatically go into savings,” she explained. “Over time, the multiplier effect was significant.”
Even investment was being reimagined through products like Ziidi Trader, which lowered the barriers to participating in capital markets by removing paperwork-heavy processes traditionally associated with stock investing.
Esther acknowledged that the financial sector had once been slow to adapt. Risk management often overshadowed innovation. “We perhaps over-indexed on risk at the expense of customers and changing demographics,” she said.
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But competition changed that equation. New players and shifting customer expectations forced incumbents to rethink everything from onboarding processes to product design. Institutions like the now-defunct Chase Bank Kenya once signaled both the fragility and urgency of innovation in the sector, reinforcing the need for systems that evolved as quickly as their users did.
One of the most striking insights from Esther’s conversation was how financial maturity changed perspective. At senior levels, success was no longer measured by income alone, but by structure, sustainability, and timing.
The question became not how much was earned, but how what was earned was structured over time. Beyond personal wealth, the broader responsibility was institutional, ensuring that financial systems remained stable, inclusive, and forward-looking enough to avoid obsolescence.
Esther Waititu’s story was not just a personal financial journey. It was a reflection of a continent-wide transformation in how money was earned, moved, saved, and invested. From banking halls to mobile wallets, from rigid salary structures to dynamic reward systems, from exclusion to access, her work sat at the center of a financial system being rebuilt in real time.
And perhaps the most important shift was not technological at all, but philosophical: the idea that financial participation should not be reserved for the few, but embedded in the everyday lives of the many.
