Banking is no longer defined solely by branches, balance sheets, and traditional financial products. As technology reshapes how customers transact, borrow, save, and interact with institutions, the most significant opportunities increasingly emerge at the point where financial expertise meets digital capability. For Ruguru E. Gatama, Group Director for Digital Business at I&M Bank, this convergence has been more than an industry trend. It has defined much of her professional journey across banking, telecommunications, fintech, and digital financial services.
Her career has given her a rare view of this transformation from multiple sides. She began as a banker at CBA, now NCBA, during the emergence of M-PESA, moved into technology at Safaricom and later into its M-PESA fintech operations, and then worked within the broader fintech ecosystem before returning to banking. Each transition reinforced a central principle: technology has little meaning on its own unless it is applied to solve a genuine customer or business problem. At I&M Bank, that philosophy continues to shape how she approaches artificial intelligence, data, digital transformation, and the future of financial services across East Africa.
Seeing Opportunity Where Banking Meets Technology
Working across banking and technology taught Ruguru that neither industry can operate independently if the objective is to create meaningful customer value. The real opportunity lies in understanding what each side brings to the table and finding the point where those capabilities can converge to address a need. Her professional journey allowed her to experience that convergence from several perspectives, beginning with traditional banking and later moving into telecommunications and fintech.
At CBA, Ruguru witnessed the birth of M-PESA at a time when the bank was willing to support and partner with the emerging mobile-money model. Her subsequent move to Safaricom showed her how telecommunications infrastructure could become a powerful foundation for financial services. Within Safaricom’s M-PESA division, she became closely involved with the development of Fuliza M-PESA, a product she identifies as one of the achievements she is most proud of and one that has continued to receive recognition locally and internationally.
Her move into pure fintech added another dimension. Fintech companies often occupy the space between financial institutions and other industries, using technology to make connections
work and deliver financial solutions that traditional institutions may not easily provide on their own. Returning to banking therefore did not mean returning to the old model. It brought with it a broader understanding of how banks could leverage technology, partnerships, and external capabilities to create new forms of value.
For Ruguru, that is ultimately the thinking behind fintech itself: bringing technology and financial services together to solve problems. The experience has challenged her to look beyond the provision of basic financial products and consider how banks can use technology and collaboration to become more relevant to customers. Technology by itself remains technology. Its significance emerges through how effectively it is rendered into a solution.
Starting With the Customer, Not the Technology
That philosophy also determines how Ruguru evaluates new technologies. Instead of beginning with a question about which emerging tool the bank should adopt, she starts with the customer. What does the customer need? What problem is the institution actually trying to solve? Those questions establish the foundation before technology enters the conversation.
Starting with a genuine challenge changes the nature of digital transformation. It prevents organizations from chasing whichever technology happens to dominate the current conversation and instead encourages them to examine what capabilities already exist and how those capabilities can be brought together to create measurable value. The technology becomes a means rather than the objective.
Artificial intelligence provides a useful illustration. Although AI has become one of the most prominent technology discussions of recent years, Ruguru points out that its underlying principles have been creating value for much longer. Automation in motor vehicle assembly, for instance, demonstrates how intelligent technologies have historically been applied to improve processes, productivity, and outcomes. The novelty may change, but the fundamental question remains the same: what value can the technology create?
For banks, this approach creates greater discipline around innovation. Rather than acquiring sophisticated tools simply because they are available, institutions need to identify the customer or business problem first, understand the technologies they can leverage, and then determine how those capabilities can work together. In Ruguru’s view, this is what transforms technology from an attractive concept into a practical financial-services solution.
Making AI Work Behind Better Banking Decisions
AI is already playing a significant role in banking, particularly in areas where large volumes of data can improve decision-making. Ruguru sees its value in the ability to accumulate and interpret information, generate useful insights, and apply those insights to decisions that affect both customers and the institution.
Lending is one clear example. Data can help banks understand customer risk profiles and establish income proxies, allowing them to make more informed decisions about appropriate credit limits. Rather than relying solely on conventional indicators, institutions can use data-driven intelligence to develop a more nuanced understanding of individual customers and their financial circumstances.
AI also has an important role in improving operational efficiency. At I&M Bank, the focus extends to reducing the time employees spend on repetitive banking and operational activities so that they can devote more attention to engaging with and serving customers. This shift can improve both productivity and the quality of human interaction within the bank.
For Ruguru, the larger opportunity is therefore not simply to deploy AI but to use it to strengthen decision-making, improve customer experiences, increase operational efficiency, and optimize employee time. She is particularly interested in using AI to supercharge the productivity of the bank’s digital factory, automating repetitive work so that technology can release greater business value while people concentrate on work that requires judgment, creativity, and meaningful customer engagement.
Building Personalization on a Foundation of Trust
As banking becomes increasingly data-driven, Ruguru believes personalization must develop alongside transparency. Customers need to understand what institutions are doing with their information and why. In her view, the first step is to communicate clearly about data use and obtain customer consent. When people can see the connection between the information they provide and the value they receive, apprehension around data can give way to greater confidence.
Credit offers illustrate the difference. A customer who has allowed I&M Bank to access information such as Credit Reference Bureau data can understand why the institution is able to develop a more relevant lending proposition. That experience is fundamentally different from receiving a generic KES 300,000 loan offer when the customer may actually need KES 500,000 for a specific business requirement. Personalization becomes meaningful when the customer can recognize the reason behind the recommendation.
Ruguru sees this as an area where banks, fintechs, and data controllers must close an important gap. Openness about the purpose and value of data collection can help customers understand the relationship between information and improved service. She draws a parallel with social media, where users initially embraced platforms because they could immediately see the value of connecting with friends and communities, even before stronger consent requirements such as GDPR changed the expectations around data collection. Continued customer education, she believes, will remain essential to reducing uncertainty and demonstrating the benefits of responsible data use.
Banking at the Exact Point of Need
The banking experience of the future, in Ruguru’s view, should feel intuitive rather than transactional. Contextual financial services represent the direction in which banking needs to move, with institutions responding to customers at the precise moment a financial need emerges instead of attempting to sell products long afterward.
Consider a customer paying for groceries at Carrefour with a debit card and discovering that the account does not contain enough money. Instead of abandoning the transaction and searching for another card, a contextual banking system could recognize the customer’s relationship with the bank and offer an appropriate overdraft facility at that exact moment. The service becomes relevant because it responds to the customer’s immediate circumstances.
The same principle can apply to recurring payments. During a post-paid utility transaction, a bank could identify the opportunity to help the customer retrieve monthly bills and establish a more convenient payment routine. More sophisticated analytics could reveal broader life events through patterns of activity. If a customer has regularly made payments to a hospital or a gynaecologist’s paybill over several months, the pattern could indicate preparations for a child. With appropriate consent and responsible data use, the bank could then present relevant services such as insurance or education solutions.
This represents a fundamental shift from product-led selling to contextual service delivery. Instead of encountering an insurance flyer or a salesperson promoting a generic product, customers receive relevant solutions when those solutions make sense. Ruguru sees detailed hyper-personalization, powered by data analytics, as a defining characteristic of future financial services.
Designing Digital Banking Around African Realities
Africa presents a distinctive digital banking environment, particularly in East Africa, where mobile money has fundamentally influenced financial inclusion and digital adoption. Ruguru’s experience at the intersection of banking and telecommunications has given her a direct view of how mobile-money infrastructure accelerated the development of digital financial services.
The financial inclusion gap itself forced institutions to think differently and move faster than traditional banking models might have allowed. Yet African banks cannot simply copy digital strategies from more developed markets. Smartphone penetration remains uneven, meaning institutions must continually ask what technology customers actually have in their hands and how services can be delivered through those channels. USSD therefore remains relevant for some services, even as smartphone applications expand.
Regional payments represent another major opportunity. Ruguru believes Africa can simplify intra-regional trade by making better use of regional payment capabilities rather than allowing transactions to leave the continent through international systems such as SWIFT before returning to African markets. Simplifying payments and trade within the region could become an important driver of digital banking development.
For I&M Bank, operating across East Africa means staying closely aligned with these changing realities. The region is also seeing substantial AI adoption, particularly among younger adults aged 18 to 35, an important customer segment for the bank. Ruguru believes African markets should not automatically be viewed as playing catch-up. They often adopt new technologies quickly, but successful digital strategies still need to reflect local demographics, infrastructure, customer behavior, and market dynamics.
Moving Beyond the Technology Purchase
One of the biggest misconceptions about digital transformation is that technology itself guarantees transformation. Ruguru also challenges the assumption that technology is inherently intended to be misused. While misuse is possible, regulators and industry bodies are actively developing frameworks and policies designed to enable responsible digital transformation.
The more persistent misconception concerns people. AI does not automatically make employees irrelevant. Instead, the nature of work changes, creating a need for continuous learning, unlearning, and relearning. Employees who develop new AI-related capabilities can diversify their roles and participate in the opportunities created by technology.
For Ruguru, buying sophisticated AI tools is only the beginning. An institution becomes transformative through the use cases it develops and the value those use cases create for customers and the business. She acknowledges genuine concerns around AI, including whether increasingly advanced systems could expose weaknesses in existing infrastructure or contribute to cyber risks. Those concerns make regulatory awareness, responsible implementation, and future-proofing essential.
The answer is therefore neither blind adoption nor fear of innovation. Banks need to understand what emerging technologies make possible, build the capabilities to use them responsibly, remain aligned with regulatory developments, and ensure that transformation produces tangible value rather than simply adding another layer of technology.
Taking Employees From Automation to Opportunity
For Ruguru, successful transformation depends as much on people as it does on technology. Traditional banking teams need to be carried along rather than presented with digitization as a threat to their relevance. The starting point is to demonstrate what becomes possible when repetitive work is automated and then help employees understand how they can use that recovered capacity to create greater value.
The legal function provides one example. If technology automates contract reviews, the question should not simply be what happens to the lawyers whose previous work has been reduced. Their expertise could instead support new services, such as providing customers with value-added legal insights or developing industry-specific expertise that strengthens the bank’s understanding of its customers. Similarly, when branch automation reduces the time tellers
spend opening accounts, those employees can devote more attention to understanding customers and identifying relevant financial solutions.
That transition, however, requires deliberate leadership. Employees need new objectives, career pathways, tools, and capacity-building opportunities. If someone was previously measured by the number of accounts opened and a bot now performs that task, the employee naturally needs clarity about what success looks like next. Shifting the objective toward customer engagement and developing additional business opportunities changes the role and gives technology a constructive purpose.
Ruguru therefore sees digital transformation as a culture transformation. Organizations must map careers away from tasks being automated, identify emerging opportunities, and equip people to move into them. Technology becomes less threatening when employees can see where they fit into the bank’s future and how their expertise can be redirected toward higher-value work.
Keeping the Human in the Loop
As AI becomes increasingly embedded in banking, Ruguru identifies one capability as indispensable for the next generation of leaders: remaining the human in the loop. Technology can accelerate cognitive tasks, but relying on AI without understanding, validating, and interpreting its output can produce shallow results.
She compares AI-assisted research to visiting a library, collecting a stack of books, and copying paragraphs without actually understanding the material. The availability of information does not eliminate the need for human judgment. Leaders still have to evaluate what they consume, validate its relevance, and add their own perspective.
At the same time, she believes people should actively use AI to simplify everyday work. The essential skill is not possessing every AI tool available, but knowing how to apply the right capability to a practical need. Even a simple application that summarizes a day’s emails and identifies required actions can immediately improve productivity. Organizations can accelerate adoption by giving employees these straightforward, relevant use cases rather than presenting AI as an abstract technological revolution.
Rebuilding Banking Around Real Customer Needs
If Ruguru could redesign banking from scratch, she would retain one fundamental element: relationship management. Human relationships remain important, but relationship managers should be equipped with better data and tools so they can understand customer needs quickly and respond with relevant solutions instead of relying on generic product pitches.
Access to customer information gathered through legitimate interactions can help relationship managers develop a clearer understanding of individual circumstances. That changes the
conversation from presenting a catalogue of banking products to identifying what the customer actually needs. Ruguru believes this is where banking needs to move: from product-oriented selling toward genuine problem-solving.
She would eliminate the traditional way of thinking about banking, particularly the assumption that institutions should create a collection of products and simply ask customers to choose from them. Too often, products are developed because institutions are following trends rather than responding to demonstrated customer needs. Women’s banking is one example. Creating a product with a gender-focused marketing campaign does not necessarily mean an institution has understood the diverse needs of women customers or designed solutions around those needs.
The fintech sector has demonstrated what can happen when organizations approach financial services from a different perspective. Mobile money became highly relevant because it addressed a problem that traditional banking had approached through account ownership and conventional processes. Instead of requiring both parties to maintain bank accounts simply to transfer money, mobile money created a channel through which value could move immediately.
Creating Banking That Belongs in the Ecosystem
For Ruguru, this evolution does not mean banks need to solve every problem themselves. Fintech companies have created opportunities precisely because they specialize in solving particular customer problems from different angles. Banks should therefore collaborate with them and determine how banking capabilities can be layered into wider digital ecosystems.
This reflects the central theme running through Ruguru’s career: the future of financial services lies at the point of convergence. Banking expertise, technology, data, telecommunications, fintech capabilities, and partnerships can become far more valuable when they work together around a clearly understood customer need.
Her vision is consequently less about building the most technologically sophisticated bank and more about creating an institution capable of responding intelligently to the lives of its customers. It is a model in which data informs relevance, AI strengthens human decision-making, employees move toward higher-value work, and digital channels meet people where they are.
For I&M Bank and the wider African financial-services landscape, that mindset offers a framework for navigating the next phase of transformation. Ruguru’s journey across banking, telecommunications, fintech, and digital business has reinforced a simple but powerful principle: innovation becomes meaningful only when it solves something that matters. The future of banking will belong not merely to institutions that adopt technology, but to those that understand how to turn convergence into customer value, trust, inclusion, and lasting business relevance.
For Print and Design Purpose:
Quotes:
“I am most excited about super-charging our digital factory productivity and automating repetitive tasks for greater business value.”
I think bankers need to think differently and challenge ourselves to become more solution-oriented.“
“I would take away traditional banking thinking and traditional bank-speak to create more room for innovation within the banking industry.”
