John Gachora: My rise to the top of banking world

To get the blessings of Alliance High School to attend a three-month exchange programme in the United States, a student had to be better than the rest in almost every score.

Former Alliance principal and veteran mathematics teacher Christopher Khaemba says the student needed to outperform others in all metrics, including academics, co-curricular activities, knowledge of international affairs, among others.

In 1989, the learner who met those criteria to go to Brooks School in the US state of Massachusetts was John Gachora Mburu — a tiny village boy from Limuru, who came to Alliance at a time when students from fairly rich backgrounds tended to fare better, and surprised many by how fast he adapted and excelled.

“He was at the top of his class for the five years he was in school,” recalls Mr Khaemba.

Gachora, the boy from Gatamaiyu in Kiambu County, now had the chance to witness first-hand life in the West; a life he had only had distant glimpses of in books, magazines and television programmes.

He finished his stay at the Boston-based school and returned to Alliance, but not for too long.

While at Brooks, Gachora exploited the opportunity, visiting places like the world-famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard and getting to understand what it took to get admitted to such hallowed academic institutions. “Upon returning to Alliance, he applied for admission to MIT. I wrote his recommendation and he was admitted to join before he sat his A-level national exams,” Mr Khaemba told Lifestyle.

Electrical engineering

That saw the curious Kamahindu Primary School old boy join the American institute where, from 1989 to 1993, he was hard at work to secure his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science.

Today, that boy is the group managing director of NCBA Group, a banking giant that was created through the merger of NIC and CBA banks in October 2019. He had been heading NIC Bank for six years before the merger.

After a few turns on the skyscraper-laden Upper Hill, an area with a high concentration of bank headquarters, we head to Mr Gachora’s NCBA Centre office on a busy Tuesday morning.

We are welcomed by a man who, throughout the interview, seems keen to downplay the fact that some may consider him to be at the pinnacle of his career—running Kenya’s third largest bank by assets.

We spend the next 71 minutes discussing the recent changes to M-Shwari and Fuliza services in partnership with Safaricom, how his avocados in Limuru are faring, the frustrating system hiccups that hundreds of NCBA customers have recently been complaining about, and how he is a “terrible” golfer who nonetheless uses the game to impart life lessons on his young family.

Also, does he regret switching from engineering to banking?

“No,” he answers.

“Although I must say that when I read the engineering journals, I get very excited,” he says. The work his former engineering school colleagues are doing, he says, excites him.

Mr Gachora believes the training in engineering is helpful to him as a banker.

“A degree, especially in electrical and mechanical engineering, gives you perhaps the simplest way to look at life processes; because life is all about input: You process inputs and you have outputs. And that’s all engineering is about,” he says.

“When you come to banking, it’s exactly like that. We take a lot of inputs every day and process them,” he adds. “Then what goes out is what people see; what you give your customers. Then customers give you feedback and you get more input and process it. So, it’s actually an engineering system.”

Curious mind

Mr Khaemba, a former county minister under the first governor of Nairobi Evans Kidero, has been keeping track of Mr Gachora’s progress ever since the Alliance days. This boy he taught mathematics between 1984 and 1988 had something special in him.

 Now the co-founder and director of Nova Pioneer Academies and a director at Housing Finance Foundation, Mr Khaemba says he was surprised upon learning of Mr Gachora’s switch to banking. But when he remembered what a curious mind Mr Gachora had, he understood.

“I remembered that his sense of curiosity stood out. While many students who were focused on sciences avoided such subjects as history, Gachora retained all the sciences and added history, loading himself with an extra subject while other students took eight,” Mr Khaemba tells Lifestyle.

“I suspect that upon obtaining his Master’s degree in electrical and computer science at MIT, his curiosity pointed him to the unexplored world of Wall Street.”

We reach out to Mr Khaemba a day after speaking to Mr Gachora. In a week when the World Teachers’ Day was observed, the bond between the two is remarkable. They have maintained their connection since their days at Alliance, supporting each other in various initiatives, and Mr Gachora once hosted Mr Khaemba in North Carolina in 2007.

“He was my maths teacher, and I was fairly good in maths,” says Mr Gachora. “He was one person who seemed to place, I’d say, a lot of trust in me throughout and had confidence in me. When you are young, you need that.”

Mr Khaemba, who was also the senior housemaster of Smith House where Mr Gachora boarded, also has a compliment for his former student: “He had such qualities that a teacher desired to see in his students… He settled in school quickly, unleashing his intellect and disciplined work habits that saw him perform at the top of his class.”

Mr Gachora joined the banking world in 1994. He told the Business Daily in 2014 that he was ready to go for his PhD “if I didn’t get a job that was going to pay me $50,000 (Sh5.4 million on current rates) a year”.

Career trajectory

“I got three offers, two of which paid more, but I picked the last offer, which paid less at Wall Street,” he added, explaining that he settled on it because it was in line with the career trajectory he had in mind.

And so, being a vice president at Credit Suisse First Boston was his first engagement after leaving MIT.

“First, Boston was one of the premier Wall Street banks that were bought by (Switzerland-based banking conglomerate) Credit Suisse,” he says. “Credit Suisse bought the investment bank called First Boston, and they called it Credit Suisse First Boston.”

It focused on investment banking, a line of business that places more emphasis on large corporations and investors.

“It was mostly advisory work. My particular job was creating some of those famous bond products that some blame for the (global financial) crisis in 2008,” Mr Gachora says with a chuckle.

He held that position from 1994 to 2004. In between, he took time to get an MBA in finance and management at the Wharton School (a constituent of the University of Pennsylvania) between 2000 and 2002.

After leaving Credit Suisse, he headed to Banc of America Securities, then a part of Bank of America, where he was managing director between 2004 and 2008. He would later spend three years in the banking world in South Africa before he returned to Kenya to be the managing director and CEO of NIC Bank.

Coincidentally, we are having the interview when a story about the first black CEO of Credit Suisse, his first employer, is trending online; a story that has forced an apology from the giant bank. It is about the tumultuous five years of Tidjane Thiam, the Ivorian executive who, like Mr Gachora, started off by training as an engineer before cutting his teeth into the world of business leadership, eventually becoming the CEO of the multinational bank that made $35.3 billion (Sh3.8 trillion) in revenue in the year ended June 2020.

As reported by the New York Times, Mr Thiam’s five years as the first black executive ended in resignation and was punctuated by periods of racial denigration from fellow bank heads and shareholders.

Following the story, which reported that Mr Thiam once left a party organised by the bank chairman when a black performer dressed as a janitor appeared on stage, Credit Suisse apologised on Wednesday, saying it is strongly committed to equality.

Mr Gachora says he read the story keenly.

“It’s a painful one to read, but I looked at it differently,” he says. “It’s a tough place to be, but I think, to his credit, he did a fabulous job. He had five very good years in that bank, turned it around and did very well with it.”

He goes on: “The way he left was surprising. He was the pride not just for bankers like me but Africans. And we shouldn’t look at his achievements any other way. That story spoke a lot about him as a victim and I thought that it left the other part of him as a hero, because he was a hero.”

Away from the shock waves from Switzerland, there is a storm in NCBA’s online platforms. Under every post the bank makes, there are often customers complaining of one inconvenience or another; be it a failed ATM withdrawal, slow customer care response, non-responsive systems among others. Others are blunt enough to write that the merger reduced the quality of service they used to enjoy.

Mr Gachora admits that there are issues, and most of them are to do with merging of the banking systems. Over the past few weeks, he says, the group has been merging customer details. Initially, the core banking systems existed separately and were inter-connected with a bridging software. While the bridging worked, he says, it did not offer access to all data, and it was not uncommon for a former CBA customer to be referred to an NIC branch.

“We wanted to take away that noise by having one uniform experience for our customers. That is why we decided to merge our systems, almost a year down the line,” he says.

“Now, merging two banking systems is very difficult,” adds Mr Gachora . The works done so far, he notes, have ensured seamless operation of branches but there is still more to do.

Online banking

“Mobile banking was unstable for a while; now I think we’ve got everything stable,” he says.

“What has really taken time to work is online banking. And the reason that has taken time to work is that what we did was to combine all the customers onto one online banking platform; whether you are ex-CBA or ex-NIC. And what we have found is that the capacity tripled; or the required capacity tripled. And that is causing a lot of problems.”

We are having the conversation in the middle of the customer service week, where corporates have served their clients with not too few videos of “Jerusalema” dance challenges and sent messages, some half-hearted, about how they appreciate their customers.

In Mr Gachora’s view, a well-served customer in the banking world is one who can serve him or herself and who gets answers quickly. He says he often reads the comments posted by customers on social media platforms.

“I do, because it’s immediate, live, unemotional feedback. Some of it a bit emotional, but generally unemotional feedback to your services,” he says. “You know, they call it listening to the sound of the river. It’s very important to listen to what your customer is saying.”

To relieve his stress about the bottom line and the bank’s operations (he says you aren’t doing it right if you aren’t a bit nervous), Mr Gachora seeks the embrace of nature, letting his love for trees and the environment be his therapy. His love for trees has seen him plant more than 600 avocados, at least 2,500 eucalyptus trees and more than 1,000 casuarina trees in his farms, besides cultivating tea. He took a Business Daily team to his avocado farm in 2018 when the seedlings had just been planted.

“It turns out that Limuru is very cold for avocados. So, they are growing slower than they should; but they are growing,” he says, noting that the avocado can be a good plant to replace the trees being felled in Nairobi every other day.

Even golfing and hiking, his favourite hiking activities, are connected to nature.

“I was the patron of the NIC hiking club, and because of Covid-19,  we haven’t got the NCBA one to really work,” he says, adding that he has hiked Mt Longonot, Elephant Hills, Ngong Hills among others. As for golfing: “I’m a terrible golfer. Let me start by saying that.”

But he notes that his wife and children have taken up the sport well, and they are often at Muthaiga Golf Club competing against each other.

Their children are aged 11, 10 and six. The two elder ones, a boy and a girl , have been seeking to make an extra shilling from their parents by trying their best in golfing.

The children get awarded for their success in golf and use the money to buy themselves toys and whatever else they like, and Mr Gachora is impressed by the way it has imparted on them the lesson that a person should work hard to get what they fancy.

Speaking of fancying, a number of Kenyans have had to use loan services jointly owned by NCBA and Safaricom, which are M-Shwari and Fuliza.

Recently, NCBA decided that borrowing Sh2,000 and below would not be under M-Shwari but will be addressed by Fuliza, the service that allows one to pay more than they have in their M-Pesa wallet and deducts the overdraft as soon as money is received on the M-Pesa account.

“When you analyse the market, you realise that for less than Sh2,000, the spending is usually ad-hoc,” he says. “You do something and realise you’ll pay more money. Fuliza is supposed to do exactly that. That’s why it’s an overdraft. You shouldn’t go shopping hoping to use Fuliza.”

He adds: “For M-Shwari, its role was planned for credit. You plan to go buy potatoes and sell them. M-Shwari made a lot of sense. You have a duka and you wanted to add more stock, M-Shwari made a lot of sense for that kind of business. Fuliza is supposed to be ad-hoc credit.”

Still on things ad-hoc, he says 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic that came with it has forced a change in the way people make plans, and it has taught him that a person should be willing to change plans at a moment’s notice.

“The old saying that ‘you plan, God laughs’ is true,” he says. “What it has taught us is that you must have quick-fire planning. You must be willing to change your plans at a moment’s notice.”

And he feels sorry that he has not visited his 84-year-old mother in the village since March, and he says she has been complaining.

“That is obviously challenging for me personally,” he says.

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