🎙 F-Squared Podcast #6 – From M-Shwari to Loop: Eric Muriuki on Building Fintech Infrastructure at Scale
A grounded conversation on scaling digital credit, platform-thinking, and Kenya’s fintech evolution.
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Why I Wanted to Have This Conversation
Most people know M-Pesa. Some know M-Shwari. Fewer know that behind these innovations sat a quiet team in which Eric Muriuki played a key role in designing the legal structures, scaling the products, and navigating complex bank-regulator dynamics to bring them to life.
But what happens after you've built the rails for Kenya’s most successful digital credit products? You turn your focus to infrastructure. That’s what Eric is doing now at Loop Digital Financial Services: building the platform layer that will power other fintechs, edtechs, and even agtechs across Africa.
I wanted to talk to Eric not just because of what he’s built, but because of how he thinks. Whether it’s pitching Fuliza in 2015 (four years before it launched), scaling M-Shwari from 60K to 15 million users in 41 days, or redefining hiring by prioritizing AI over headcount, his lens is always structural, practical, and long-term. He was a tough nut to crack, I had to put on my entrepreneurial hat and pester him countless times to join the show. Luckily he did and he didn’t disappoint. Not many people have built platforms that disburse close to US$ 10 billion in loans. Moreover, fewer have done this across 10 markets in Africa.
This is a masterclass in what it takes to build and rebuild Africa’s financial systems from the ground up, with both product and platform DNA.
In This Episode, You’ll Hear:
How Commercial Bank of Africa now NCBA after a merger with NIC Bank helped shape the trust account model behind M-Pesa’s launch, and why that model still underpins digital wallets globally. According to Eric, M-Pesa was the world's first digital currency.
The real origin of M-Shwari: why it started as his MBA thesis, and how its rollout was first blocked by regulators.
Fuliza’s journey from internal pitch to Kenya’s most used overdraft tool, moving $20M every day.
How Loop DFS is pivoting from neobank to platform infrastructure, building APIs for onboarding, payments, credit, and more.
Why fintechs must shift from product-thinking to platform-thinking to unlock scale.
How Eric’s team now uses AI-first principles in hiring and decision-making.
What Kenya’s fintech industry being worth more than tea exports actually signals for national priorities.
The overlooked truth of selling to boards: don’t bring problems - bring proposals.
His experience launching Loop 3.0 and winning back early users after initial rejection.
The new generation of African fintech: born inside legacy institutions, scaling through platforms, and grounded in regulatory trust.
🔑 Key Lessons Learned
Regulation and Strategy
M-Shwari only succeeded after it shifted from mass auto-onboarding to regulator-aligned opt-ins.
Trust structures, not just technology, are what unlocked M-Pesa’s growth.
Legal innovation is often more important than code when building in regulated markets.Getting product-market-regulator fit is the real game in African fintech.
Scaling Infrastructure
Fuliza was first pitched in 2015 but launched four years later due to ecosystem timing.
Products that become verbs (like “Fuliza”) prove cultural embeddedness.
Loop DFS is now enabling other companies—by abstracting away banking complexity through its platform.
Kenya’s early mobile money bets are now bearing fruit through second-generation plays like Loop.
Team, Talent & Culture
AI-first hiring: If a role can be done by AI, don’t hire a human.
Fintechs must evolve their internal cultures just as fast as their external offerings.
Boards and exec teams only back bold ideas when founders bring solutions—not complaints.Platform-building requires cross-functional fluency across compliance, operations, tech, and UX.
Market and Metrics
Growth at M-Shwari wasn’t linear: 60,000 accounts became 15 million in just over a month.
Fintech is now Kenya’s most exciting export sector—eclipsing even tea in value.
The most valuable customer? The 33-year-old in transition: buying a car, starting a family, planning an MBA.
Distribution, not just innovation, determines success in embedded finance.
🧠 Strategic Takeaways for Operators, Investors, and Policymakers
Operators: Platform-thinking is your growth unlock. Build what others can build on.
Investors: Don’t just chase user growth. Look for fintechs building infrastructure others depend on.
Policymakers: Kenya’s leadership in digital finance is no accident—it was built on deliberate legal design, not just flashy UX.
🧾 If You’re Interested In:
The real story behind M-Shwari and Fuliza
How to transition from product-led growth to platform-led enablement
Lessons in selling to banks, regulators, and boardrooms
What the next phase of African fintech looks like beyond apps and into APIs
→ then this episode is a must-listen.
Transcript
Samora Kariuki: Welcome to F squared, the podcast of the Frontier Fintech newsletter. I'm Samora Kariuki and today I'm joined by Eric Muriuki, the architect behind M-Shwari, co-creator of Fuliza and now CEO of Loop DFS. In our conversation, we uncover the hidden stories behind the creation of M-Shwari and Fuliza, dive into the decisions that shaped Kenya's digital credit landscape, and trace the evolution of Loop into a Pan-African fintech platform targeting 10 markets in the next 3 years. Eric also shares lessons from building financial infrastructure at scale and how he sees AI driving the next phase of innovation in African fintech. If you find this episode valuable, make sure to subscribe to FSQ and the Frontier Fintech newsletter. Let's get into it. So, Eric, welcome.
Eric Muriuki: Thank you.
Samora Kariuki: And thanks for joining the show. Just for context, I followed a bit of Loop and NCBA for a long time. I met the chairman Isaac some time four years ago and he introduced me to you at your office. Very interesting story, but then I looked at your profile on LinkedIn and you joined NCBA in 2007. That was a time everything was kicking off. In my head I was like, that's the guy I need to speak to. I can't genuinely have a conversation about fintech in Kenya without speaking to you. So I'm very, very excited to have you on the show. Let's just jump in. You joined CBN in 2007. That's the time M-Pesa was kicking off and you guys were partners, at least in terms of you holding the balances that are sitting behind. You joined as the program director of enterprise transformation. So that clearly tells me that you played a key role in this entire thing. What were you doing those early years?
Eric Muriuki: M-Pesa launched in 2007. I joined CBA at the time in July 2007. So, I can't take credit. I found something that was just beginning. When I joined CBA at the time, CBA was going through an entire replatforming, had changed the strategy, and every bit of technology was being ripped out and basically bringing in new technology and putting the whole thing back together and essentially changing our operating model.
We were keeping the same strategic focus. CBA was at the time a very niche, high net worth profile type of bank. 80% of the business was corporate, 20% of the business was retail. So I came in to do essentially a hack job, just pull out everything and reassemble a new bank. Simultaneously, the conversations with M-Pesa, M-Pesa had literally just started, was still in pilot. But CBA played quite an important role at the time. If you read a lot of literature, you'll hear some of the early stories of M-Pesa was that it was launched without regulation. Not true. It was actually launched with regulation. Safaricom was not the regulated entity. The entity that the regulator was engaging with was CBA. So our contribution to the M-Pesa story is actually designing and putting in place the model that enabled for electronic money, a concept that didn't exist, to actually be launched in a manner that the regulator feels comfortable with, and they feel that they have some level of control, but the control was affected through CBA.
The structure that was put in place is what you call the trust account arrangement. Essentially, every unit, because when you have M-Pesa, it's just data that you have that says you have 5,000 Bob. The real 5,000 Kenya shillings, the fiat currency, actually sits in a trust account at CBA. There's a heartbeat between our platforms and the M-Pesa platform that says yes, if an agent loads value, introduces electronic money into the M-Pesa ecosystem, we have actually taken the real Kenya shillings. If you then come and buy float or essentially exchange Kenya shillings for M-Pesa at an agent, that exchange we can show to the regulator at any time this transaction has actually happened. If he sends money to someone else, we are able to give the regulator a full account of the value of electronic money issued. To explain why that is important, legally, Kenyan tender can only be issued by the Central Bank and then through the fractional reserve model of reserve banking model of the bank ecosystem. Here we are allowing a telco to issue effectively legal tender but in electronic form. So if you think about it, that was quite a step change from how money and money supply was considered. To date, M-Pesa was celebrating 18 years just the other day. 18 years on, every market you go to, the regulatory model, trust account arrangements is exactly the same. So even when other regulators are developing their own regulations, they're just picking the Kenya regulations. To date, we've continued to be the settlement bank for the electronic money issued off the M-Pesa platform. Of course, for risk management purposes, they've brought on more banks, but all the reconciliation is done centrally.
Samora Kariuki: And that's because you had built the systems and the knowledge. Interestingly, when I was in banking in Burundi, that was in 2015, EcoCash was launching and they went around all the banks saying that we want a settlement trust account bank and people were like, what are you guys talking about? Luckily, I knew the story. So, we took that on and it was one of the things that helped that bank at the time really scale. So, I've got a very intuitive understanding of the whole idea. I even say people talk about stable coins now and always say those things were launched 18 years ago. What's the big deal? The excitement about crypto, and there are some things that are different that would make me excited about crypto, but the idea of digital currency, M-Pesa was the world's first digital currency.
Eric Muriuki: Precisely. Precisely. The only difference between say M-Pesa and Bitcoin is the trust architecture. With crypto, using cryptography to create trust that one unit of Bitcoin is equal to X number of dollars. Without cryptography, what we've set up as that trust arrangement is essentially CBA acting as the trust agent that you can trust the value that you're holding in your M-Pesa wallet.
Samora Kariuki: It's doing kind of just within a centralized model. Now, one of the things is that, of course, you mentioned that this was a primarily corporate bank, 80%, and it was known at the time, CBA concur elegance, all that kind of thing, it was known as a high net worth bank and a corporate bank. Then you were brought in to handle a lot of the tech. Was the tech being adjusted or retooled because of M-Pesa or is it just it's been a long time and the markets are changing and we need to look at our entire tech infrastructure?
Eric Muriuki: No, CBA was needing to change its own strategy, not just because of M-Pesa, because even when we started with M-Pesa, we didn't know where this thing was going. So that couldn't be our strategy. It's something that felt right, it felt like, hey, there's something that looks interesting. We don't know what it is. They've asked for a bank to respond and help them solve this regulatory challenge and we figured out that it's something that we can do.
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