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Best Bank: Equity Bank |
Along with the invasion from Asia, there is another trend in African banking: reaching out to those who don’t have bank accounts. They go by the rather unglamorous title of ‘unbanked’. Everyone is paying lip service to this idea. In Kenya, though, Equity Bank has ventured into smaller areas and aggressively gone into lending to the retail sector. It is beginning to make decent profits from this business. And because of its efforts a lot of the bigger banks are now looking at banking (in particular retail banking) differently and therefore there has been a lot of product development and branch expansion in an attempt to expand into the retail banking segment. Barclays Bank of Kenya, which is listed on the Nairobi stock exchange, also had a good year, as did Stanbic Bank Kenya, part of Standard Bank.