Despite the decreasing value of the Shilling, Kenyans now have less of it than they’ve heard the whole of this past decade.
According to a new report released by the Central Bank of Kenya on Tuesday, the percentage of bank accounts that hold more than Sh100,000 stood at 2.49% last year.
That’s a drop from 2.62% in 2018. When you look at the data from 6 years ago, the situation is even dire. 3.94% of bank accounts held over Sh100,000 in 2014.
In terms of actual numbers, the number of accounts that held Sh100,000 increased by 105,639 last year to 1.55 million.
That was however not enough to balance with the sharp 12.7% increase in the number of new bank accounts. In total, 7.1 million new accounts were opened in 2019, bringing the total number of accounts to 62.3 million.
While these numbers are an improvement from the 2018 report, the general expectation is that things will be very bad in 2020.
The report does not capture the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic. Millions of Kenyans are thought to be worse off this year than they were last year, owing to job losses or business downturn.
When it comes to banks that hold the largest share of such accounts with over Sh100,000, Equity Bank leads with 347,787 accounts followed by KCB (253,958), Co-operative Bank (241,260), Absa (108,177) and Standard Chartered Bank (71,645).
If we look at it as a percentage of the total accounts in the bank, I&M Bank had the largest proportion of high quality savings, with 32.6% of its accounts having in excess of Sh100, 000.
StanChart followed with 31.1%.
