Equity Bank: Amazing Childhood Dream Aroused By Boy Watching Mum Keeping Money Under Mattress

The circumstances that led to the birth of what we know presently as Equity Bank were both amazingly unique and intriguing.

Dr James Mwangi, the brain behind East Africa’s currently only indigenous billion-dollar financial institution, got the idea from years of watching and seeing his widowed but hardworking mother, Grace Wairimu keeping and saving her money underneath the mattress.

Despite the fact that she was hardworking and therefore making money, and, irrespective of the fact that she was interested in keeping and saving her cash in the bank,  poor Wairimu could not do so merely because financial institutions back then in her days could not entertain customers like her from the peasantry settings.

The reason that the whole of her mother’s village of Nyagatugu in Central Kenya was inhabited by peasant farmers and herders at that time, Dr. Mwangi recalls neither seeing nor coming across any other single person there let alone her mother owning a bank account during his early years.

Turning Rejection into Innovation

As we have already stated, Dr. Mwangi shares that her mother didn’t choose nor did she fancy keeping and saving her money underneath the mattress but was instead forced to make do with the mattress merely because the banks in Kenya of his early days couldn’t permit peasants of Wairimu’s ilk to open up accounts with them.

Yet that rejection that her mother was subjected to by the banks of his early days would later on in life turn into a brilliant idea for Dr. Mwangi, propelling him to start the most capitalized and profitable indigenous financial institution than any other around today within the region. 

Seeing that her mother and her fellow locals had been denied access to banking services just because they were peasants, Dr. Mwangi’s idea of a financial institution would be anchored on the provision of banking services to all manner of people without discrimination based either on someone’s social status or any other prejudicial consideration. 

To express his idea of the bank he wanted in the simplest form, Mwangi would name his Equity Bank which is a word that is used to convey a message of fairness and justice.

Bold Career Leap

To realize his childhood dream, Dr Mwangi had to daringly first resign from his top well-paying bank job,  going on to dive into the delicate job of putting together a financial institution and that feat, when he was merely 28 years of age. 

It all started with a fairly old man Dr Paul Munga, in 1993, sweet-talking the young James Mwangi into abandoning his prestigious Group Financial Controller job at the then equally prestigious Trade Bank, inviting him to assist in reviving the local community’s mutual Building Society.  

Considering that banks of those days were allergic to dealing with peasant customers, it can be safely assumed that the Building Society had started to offer some form of banking services to the peasants whom the formal banks themselves had been averse to dealing with.

The Building Society had apparently been run down by the time Dr. Munga interested Dr. Mwangi in stepping down from his high-paying job and now was in imminent danger of collapsing under the sheer weight of debts and mismanagement, prompting the man who had started it to tap into the resourcefulness of the young Mwangi to turn it around.

From Ambition to Action

Given how he had all along dreamed about helping his people to save money and then use their savings to rid themselves of poverty, this is why Mwangi apparently was forced to leave his well-paying job to help resuscitate their only SACCO which was in great danger of going under and then condemning the majority of the peasant farmers back to keeping their money underneath mattresses and such.

For the record, Mwangi had already obtained a university degree in Commerce which the bank had apparently based on to employ him as one of its top managers and which job he was now being called upon to relinquish to go and revive a community’s SACCO in imminent and real danger of collapsing. 

For what happened next, kindly keep watching this space since we are going to be breaking down this deeply inspirational and deeply awesome piece of a story in a series form. Till then, thanks for patronizing this media website.