Equity Bank Posts Record Ksh 54 Billion Net Profit in First Half of 2026

Equity Bank Group has delivered the most profitable half-year result in its 38-year history, posting a net profit of Ksh 54 billion for the six months ended 30 June 2026 — a 28 per cent increase on the Ksh 42.2 billion recorded in the same period of 2025. The result, announced by Group Chief Executive James Mwangi at a results briefing in Nairobi, exceeded market consensus estimates by a margin that sent the bank's Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) share price up 7.4 per cent in a single session.

Total assets crossed the Ksh 2.1 trillion mark for the first time, confirming Equity's position as Kenya's largest bank by assets and the second-largest listed company on the NSE after Safaricom. Customer deposits reached Ksh 1.47 trillion, while the loan book expanded 21 per cent to Ksh 980 billion — a rate of credit growth that Mwangi attributed to deliberate portfolio diversification across the group's seven-country footprint rather than aggressive single-market exposure.

DRC: The Continental Growth Engine

The Democratic Republic of Congo subsidiary, Equity BCDC, has emerged as the group's single most important growth engine. Operating in a market of over 100 million people with one of the lowest bank penetration rates in Africa, Equity BCDC contributed Ksh 18.3 billion to group profit — representing 34 per cent of the total — on the back of foreign currency earnings from mining-sector corporate clients and a rapidly growing mobile banking base that reached 9.4 million customers by June.

"The DRC is not a frontier market for us any more. It is a core market," Mwangi said. "We have invested in the technology, the branch network, and the regulatory relationships. The return is now very visible." The DRC operation's contribution illustrates a broader strategic bet that Mwangi has pressed consistently for a decade: that Equity's path to Pan-African scale runs through underserved markets where first-mover advantage compounds over time.

Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Sudan, and Ethiopia collectively contributed Ksh 12.1 billion to group profit, with Uganda showing the strongest growth trajectory at 41 per cent year-on-year as infrastructure investment accelerated ahead of the East African pipeline project completion.

Kenya Operations: Recovery and Digital Dividends

The Kenyan home market, while no longer the dominant source of group profits it once was, showed encouraging recovery dynamics. Domestic net profit of Ksh 23.6 billion represented a 19 per cent improvement, driven by margin expansion as Treasury Bill yields — which peaked above 17 per cent in 2023 and have since moderated to around 13 per cent — maintained attractive spreads on the bank's government securities portfolio, and by a meaningful improvement in non-performing loan (NPL) ratios, which fell from 11.2 per cent to 8.7 per cent year-on-year as KRA enforcement improved tax compliance among corporate borrowers.

Equity's digital banking platform, EazzyBanking, processed 94 per cent of all transactions in H1 2026 — up from 87 per cent a year earlier — reducing the marginal cost of transaction significantly. The bank's agency banking network, spanning 52,000 agents nationwide, has become the primary touchpoint for rural customers in areas where the SGR has not yet catalysed the kind of urbanisation seen along the Nairobi-Mombasa corridor.

SHA Integration and Financial Inclusion

Equity Bank has positioned itself as a key financial infrastructure partner for the government's Social Health Authority (SHA) rollout, which is replacing the NHIF system. The bank has enrolled 4.2 million SHA contributors as of June, offering salary advance products that allow workers to pre-fund their SHA contributions and insurance bridging loans for households facing unexpected medical costs before reimbursement cycles complete. "Universal health coverage creates financial services opportunities that did not previously exist," said Chief Finance Officer Mary Wangari. "We are building the bridge between healthcare and banking."

Outlook and Governance

The group declared an interim dividend of Ksh 4 per share — a first for the bank, which has historically reserved distributions for the full-year results. Mwangi signalled confidence in H2 performance by guiding for full-year net profit between Ksh 105 billion and Ksh 112 billion, a figure that would comfortably break the Ksh 83 billion full-year record set in 2025.

Analysts at Genghis Capital and Dyer and Blair rated the results positively while flagging concentration risk in DRC as a point to monitor, given the country's chronic political volatility. Mwangi, characteristically, was untroubled: "Africa's opportunities and Africa's risks are inseparable. The art is building institutions resilient enough to capture one while managing the other."