Faith Nkatha Gitonga
Kenyan fintech strategist Faith Nkatha Gitonga 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.