Equity Bank began as a building society in Kangema with about KSh5,000. By 2019 it had over 14 million customers.

In 1984 Peter Munga founded Equity Building Society in his hometown of Kangema, in Kenya’s central highlands. With about KSh5,000, around 100 dollars at the time, as starting capital, he convinced the government to issue him a licence.

Trouble, then a turnaround

By the early 1990s the society was in difficulty. In 1993 Munga, as chairman, hired 31-year-old James Mwangi to wind up the insolvent organisation. It was losing about KSh5 million a year and had accumulated losses of about KSh33 million. Instead of closing it, Mwangi, as director of finance, began to institute changes, resulting in a slow but steady turnaround.

Mwangi was himself born in Kangema around 1962 and raised, with six siblings, by his widowed mother, Grace Wairimu. He attended secondary school on a government scholarship, studied commerce at the University of Nairobi, passed his accountancy exams and began as an auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

A bank

On 31 August 2004 the society became Equity Bank Group, and two years later it listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Mwangi is the group managing director and chief executive of Equity Group Holdings, which had over 14 million customers as of December 2019, one of the largest customer bases on the continent.

It is a story of what happens when the people brought in to close a business decide to fix it instead.