Faith Nkatha Gitonga
Faith Nkatha Gitonga is a fintech strategist and has spent the past decade turning boardroom talk about digital inclusion into commercial reality. Cutting her teeth in retail banking before jumping to Oracle’s enterprise-tech corridors, she learned to pair regulatory know-how with cloud architecture skills she later deployed at Sidian and SBM Bank, where she steered end-to-end mobile-first transformations that tripled active digital customers and halved onboarding times.
Today Gitonga runs Cellulant Kenya as country manager, directing a 100-plus team that processes billions of shillings in merchant payments each month and pilots QR-enabled checkout, farmer-payout wallets and SME credit scoring across East Africa. Armed with twin executive MBAs from Yale and UC Berkeley and a master’s in corporate psychology, she balances hard metrics with human insight, crediting product-adoption spikes to “listening as much as coding.” Off the clock she mentors girls through M-Pesa Foundation Academy, has brokered internships that placed a dozen graduates in fintech dev squads, and co-hosts a quarterly women-in-tech roundtable. Next on her roadmap: expanding Cellulant’s single-API gateway into Rwanda and South Sudan while championing gender-balanced engineering cohorts—proving that scalable payments and inclusive leadership can, and must, grow in lockstep.ademy.