Absa Next: the Kenyan bank launches an app open to non-customers to take on fintechs on their own turf

On 25 September 2026, Absa Bank Kenya launched Absa Next, an app that brings together everyday banking, savings, investments, credit and day-to-day services in one place. Its distinctive feature: it is open to everyone, including people who do not have an account with Absa. A Kenyan ID card is enough to sign up.

For a traditional bank, a subsidiary of South Africa’s Absa group, this is a change of stance. Rather than waiting for customers to come into a branch to open an account, it is going to find them where they already are: on their phones, in a market where mobile money and lending apps have got a whole generation used to managing money without a bank.

What the app offers

• Savings paying up to 7% a year, and investments advertised at up to 16%.
• Instant loans from 500 to 1 million shillings, for personal or business needs.
• Payments through PesaLink (interbank transfer), Till, PayBill and Pochi la Biashara, Kenya’s common merchant payment channels.
• Chama accounts for saving as a group.
• Adding Absa and other banks’ Visa cards, and splitting expenses with family or friends.
• A view of accounts held at other banks from a single dashboard.
• Loyalty points (“Next Coins”) converted into cash every month; withdrawals at all Absa ATMs.

The app was developed in Kenya on cloud infrastructure, and the bank presents it as a model for digital banking across the Absa group. It is available on the Android and Apple app stores. For now, only Kenyan ID cards are accepted for registration, not passports.

The former head of M-Pesa at the helm

The project bears the mark of a high-profile hire. Sitoyo Lopokoiyit, former managing director of M-Pesa Africa, now heads retail and private banking at the Absa group. He knows better than anyone how Kenyans use their phones to manage money, and why they long preferred mobile money to banks. Absa Kenya’s managing director, Yusuf Omari, was confirmed in his post on 10 September.

This is not Absa’s first mobile product. Its Timiza service, available via USSD code and app, already offers savings paying around 6% and small loans. Absa Next goes further, bringing all the services together in a single app designed first for the smartphone.

The banks’ answer to fintechs

The launch is part of a deep trend in Kenya. Banks have watched fintechs and telecom operators capture a growing share of payments, precautionary savings and above all microcredit. NCBA, in partnership with Safaricom, was one of the first to react, and has offered its separate Loop app since 2017. Other banks have followed with their own digital offers.

Banks’ advantage lies in their soundness and regulation: money deposited sits in a bank supervised by the central bank, which is reassuring. Their historic weakness lies in cumbersome processes: account opening, supporting documents, delays. Absa Next tries to keep the first asset while removing the second weakness.

A battle for the next generation

The name itself, Absa Next, reveals the target: a generation of young adults, students, early-career employees, digital and e-commerce entrepreneurs, who have never needed a bank branch. For them, a conventional bank account is often seen as slow and expensive, whereas the mobile wallet is instant. Banks know that if they do not win these customers now, they will lose them for a long time to fintechs and operators.

The chama feature illustrates this desire to match how people actually behave. In Kenya, chamas, savings groups among friends, colleagues or neighbours, handle considerable sums and are a pillar of financial life for millions of people. Managing them in a banking app, with contribution rules and traceability, meets a real need, provided the tool stays as simple as the WhatsApp groups where many chamas are organised today.

What remains unclear

Several important details were not specified at launch, notes the specialist site Tech-ish: the interest rate and fees on loans, repayment terms, the exact nature of the investments paying “up to 16%”, and the list of partner banks for account aggregation. Insurance, promised in an announcement in July, is not yet available.

These grey areas matter. An “up to” rate says little about what an average saver will earn, and an instant loan can be expensive if its fees are not clearly displayed. In Kenya, bank interest is also subject to a 15% withholding tax, to be deducted from the advertised return. Kenyan authorities have tightened transparency obligations on the total cost of credit in recent years.

Instant credit deserves particular attention. The app says it uses alternative assessment methods to decide who can borrow, without specifying what data is analysed. In Kenya, the experience of digital lending apps has shown the possible excesses: over-indebted young borrowers, high fees, aggressive debt collection. The central bank has since regulated digital lenders. A regulated bank in principle offers more guarantees, but transparency on criteria and costs remains the borrower’s best protection.

The open banking question

The feature that lets users see accounts held at other banks raises a regulatory question. Kenya does not yet have an open banking law, in other words a framework requiring banks to share, with the customer’s consent, their account data with other providers. On 21 September, the central bank published a draft national payment system bill that could change this landscape.

In the meantime, aggregation depends on case-by-case agreements between banks. A clear law on sharing financial data would benefit all players, provided it protects customers: explicit consent, the right to withdraw access, secure exchanges. It is one of the projects that will shape Kenyan banking in the coming years.

Absa Next will be judged on simple figures: the number of users who were not customers of the bank, their loyalty beyond the first few weeks, and the quality of its loan book. If the bet works, other banks on the continent could follow suit, starting with the Absa group’s subsidiaries in some ten African countries. Conversely, a failure would be a reminder that a good app is not enough to catch up on years of lead built up by mobile money.