Safaricom confirms Mungania as M-PESA boss after Waititu exit
Safaricom has appointed Boniface Mungania as Chief Financial Services Officer, effective 1 November 2026, after receiving all relevant regulatory approvals.
Mungania, who has served as interim chief financial services officer since August, succeeds Esther Masese Waititu, who left the role at the end of July after about three years. He will lead Safaricom’s financial services business, which includes M-PESA, and will report directly to the CEO.
CEO Peter Ndegwa announced Waititu’s departure in an internal memo in July, saying she was leaving “to pursue other opportunities”. In a LinkedIn post at the time, Waititu said the financial services ecosystem she had been hired to build was “firmly established” and that the time felt right “for a new chapter”.
Mungania takes charge as M-PESA continues to anchor Safaricom’s growth. The mobile money service brought in KES100.1 billion (about US$776 million) in revenue in the six months to September 2026, up 13.6% and accounting for 46.3% of Safaricom Kenya’s service revenue. It was the first time M-PESA revenue had passed KES100 billion in a half-year.
M-PESA transactions rose by 25.2% to 27.4 billion during the period, according to the operator’s half-year results released on 5 November.
Mungania has nearly 20 years of experience across financial services, digital transformation, customer care and business development, almost all of it at Safaricom.
He joined the operator in 2007 as a customer care representative and has since held several leadership roles. These include senior manager for M-PESA business development, mobile financial services consultant at Vodafone Qatar, head of M-PESA products and services development, and payments tribe lead.
Before his interim appointment, he was Director of Public Sector Digital Transformation. In that role, he led nationwide digitisation projects in agriculture, healthcare, micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and public finance, and supported the development of digital public infrastructure including application programming interfaces (APIs), digital identity and national payment systems.
According to Safaricom, Mungania played a key role in developing and scaling products that changed how customers transact, save and access financial services, and championed agile ways of working across the business.
He has been awarded the Order of the Grand Warrior (OGW) for leading national transformation programmes. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree and is studying for a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT).
His appointment follows a series of senior exits at Safaricom this year. Chief strategy officer Michael Mutiga left to become CEO of Stanbic Bank Kenya and South Sudan in August, while Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, who led M-PESA Africa for five years, joined Absa Group in March as CEO of personal and private banking.
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