Five years of audited reports from Kenya's tier-1 banks tell a striking story: not one of them recorded a net annual loss across the entire period. Combined pre-tax profits climbed 18.6% to KES 260.09 billion in 2024, then grew another 17.6% to KES 305.95 billion in 2025. That is roughly $2.36 billion in a single year, earned while households and small businesses across the country were visibly under pressure.
NCBA Group puts the scale of this run in sharp relief. Its profit after tax grew 409% between 2020 and 2025, landing at KES 23.4 billion. Dividend payouts followed suit, rising 368% over the same stretch to KES 11.7 billion. Those are numbers that belong to a boom, not a cycle of cautious lending in a difficult economy.
To be fair, caution has a logic. A small business with no property to offer as collateral, irregular sales records, and incomplete accounts is a genuinely harder credit risk to assess than a government bond. When a loan does go bad, recovery can take years, with legal and administrative costs chipping away at whatever a bank might eventually recoup.
Still, lending is a business built on the possibility of loss. The question worth sitting with is this: if Kenya's biggest banks have gone five years without a bad year, who exactly is bearing the risk they are paid to take?
Originally published by TechCabal.