Eva Ngigi-Sarwari

Eva Ngigi was born in Kenya in 1981. In an October 2021 interview with Business Daily she said she had just turned 40. She married and took the name Ngigi-Sarwari, and she was known professionally both as Eva Ngigi and as Eva Ngigi-Sarwari. She said she was drawn to financial services early, at a time when the Kenyan economy and its banking sector were growing quickly, and that she dreamed of a role that would let her make a difference. Details of her parents, siblings and exact birthplace have not been made public.

She earned a Bachelor of Business Management, majoring in marketing, from Moi University in 2004. While working and raising her first son, she completed a Master of Business Administration at the University of Nairobi, awarded in 2010 according to Wikipedia. She told The Standard that she went back for the MBA when her son was about two and took the maximum number of units to finish quickly. In 2019 she completed the Oxford Fintech Programme at the University of Oxford's Said Business School, and she then earned a postgraduate diploma in digital business from Emeritus, completed in 2020.

She began her career at the Co-operative Bank of Kenya in June 2005. Her first assignment was printing, folding and handing out paper customer statements; she then worked as a teller and in sales, and as a relationship manager she brought customers onto electronic banking systems by demonstrating products, overseeing installations and training users. A mentor steered her toward corporate banking.

She spent just over two years at CfC Stanbic Bank, where she managed sales of transactional products and services, and joined Standard Chartered Bank Kenya in November 2012. There she worked as a principal in transaction banking with development organisations and public sector clients across East Africa, and from July 2017 to January 2020 she was head of transaction banking for commercial banking, shaping strategy for Kenya and East Africa. In 2020 she became a venture lead at SC Ventures, Standard Chartered's venture building unit.

In September 2020 Visa appointed her senior business development leader and country manager for Kenya, reporting to Corine Mbiaketcha, vice president and general manager for East Africa, who said she would be responsible for developing and implementing Visa's growth strategy in Kenya. Her role later covered South Sudan and Somalia as well, with the title senior director and country manager. She focused on contactless payments for small merchants, payment security awareness, e-commerce and financial literacy, and appeared at Kenya Bankers Association campaigns and on outlets such as KTN News, Spice FM and the Nairobi Securities Exchange's channel. She left Visa in December 2024; John Njoroge later succeeded her.

In January 2025 she joined Equity Group as group director for payments and international banking, executing the bank's payments strategy across its African markets. In April 2026 she was also named managing director of Finserve Africa, Equity's payments and digital financial services subsidiary, overseeing its strategy, commercial direction and operations. She held both roles at her death.

Ngigi-Sarwari was married and had three children, two sons and a daughter, who were aged between five and 14 in late 2021. Her first son was born when she was in her mid twenties and her second when she was 30. She credited a supportive partner, saying the couple tried to "tag-team" on the children's schedules, and she called her children her biggest source of energy. She enjoyed audiobooks, especially motivational titles, took up the gym during the Covid-19 lockdown, and admitted that cars were her weakness and that she and her family liked to accumulate land and property. She listed visiting Jamaica as a bucket list item, and in a 2024 podcast she spoke about hiking Mount Kenya. The names of her husband and children have not been made public.

She believed digital payments were central to financial inclusion and that "we all need to compete against cash and to displace it from the economy", noting that cash is expensive to print, risky to carry and leaves no audit trail. She argued that mobile money and cards could co-exist in Kenya. On leadership, she said she valued inclusion because everyone has something critical to offer, and that she was "not about hierarchy but building and deepening relationships".

She spoke candidly about gender in finance: the scarcity of women leaders when she started, the support of female line managers, conscious bias against mothers, pay inequality, and senior roles lobbied for on golf courses or over drinks. She urged women not to internalise bias, to delegate rather than try to be a "super-mum", to seek mentors through personal initiative, and to make practical money decisions. "Money doesn't define you or guarantee tomorrow," she said, and her advice on wealth was "first, pay yourself."

Ngigi-Sarwari was a prominent voice in Kenya's payments industry. Her career spanned a local bank, two international banking groups, a global card network and Equity Group, and it tracked the digitisation of East African payments from paper statements to contactless cards and cross border digital rails. As Visa's country lead and later as Equity's head of payments and Finserve's managing director, she was a public advocate for financial literacy and inclusion, and her frank interviews about motherhood, bias and impostor syndrome made her a reference point for younger women in banking. TechCabal wrote that her death "cuts short a career that spanned over two decades in banking and payments."

No formal awards have been documented in the sources reviewed. She was featured by The Standard's Evewoman in its Women in Leadership and Achieving Woman series (2021), profiled by Business Daily (2021), listed in Just Ivy Africa's "Women who move money 2026", and invited as a speaker at the Africa CEO Forum 2026, the Inclusive Fintech Forum and the African Diaspora Investment Symposium 2026.

She appeared on KTN News's Trading Bell with Maina Chege and on the Nairobi Securities Exchange's interview series (both 2023), on Spice FM's Double O Direct with Olivia Otieno (2021 and 2022), in an American Chamber of Commerce Kenya women's leadership series (2021), in a long conversation with podcaster Brian Kimani (2024), and at Kenya Bankers Association financial literacy launches in 2023 and 2024. She also wrote and spoke on holiday shopping security and digital growth for Kenyan business media.

No controversies have been documented in the sources reviewed.

On 20 October 2026 her colleagues announced that Eva Ngigi-Sarwari had died, aged 45, while on a business trip to China. "It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Eva Ngigi Sarwari," the statement said, describing the news as a "sudden and profound shock" and promising further updates. The statement did not disclose the cause or the exact date of her death, and the city where she died has not been made public. Funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of writing.