Finserve Africa MD Eva Ngigi Sarwari Dies at 45
Eva Ngigi Sarwari, managing director of Finserve Africa and Equity Group’s director of payments and international banking, has died at 45 while on a business trip to China.
TechCabal first reported the news.
Her colleagues confirmed it in a statement today, calling it a sudden and profound shock. The statement gave no cause or date of death and said more updates would follow.
She spent more than 20 years in banking and payments, and her last roles put her at the center of how money moves across Africa.
Sarwari began at a local bank in 2005, fresh out of university. She said the first job was less glamorous than she expected: printing customer statements on a dot-matrix printer, folding them, putting them in envelopes and handing them out.
She moved to teller work, then sales. A mentor later told her to try corporate banking, and she did.
She said she liked putting products together into solutions for clients and seeing businesses change as a result.
Stanbic and Standard Chartered
In November 2012 she moved to Standard Chartered, where she stayed for more than seven years in transaction banking.
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Sarwari started as a principal working with development organizations and public-sector clients across East Africa.
She told The Standard that the push toward leadership came at Standard Chartered, after several leadership programmes and a lot of observation of managers she admired and managers whose methods she disliked.
Later, she went back to school for an MBA while her son was only two, and took the maximum number of units to finish quickly.
Venture Building and Visa
In 2020 she was a venture lead at SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s venture-building arm.
Sarwari held the job until December 2024 and was responsible for designing and carrying out Visa’s growth strategy across the three markets.
Back to Banking
Sarwari joined Equity Bank in January 2025 as group director for payments and international banking, in charge of executing the bank’s payments strategy across Africa.
Her colleagues said their thoughts were with her family, friends and co-workers. We join them in wishing all her loved ones comfort in this difficult time.
