As Diamond Trust Bank celebrates its 80th year in operation, finance and strategy director Alkarim Jiwa looks back on the institution’s founding commitment to SMEs. His own 28-year career at the bank also offers a perspective on how the CFO’s responsibilities have grown beyond financial stewardship.
When Diamond Trust Bank’s predecessor opened in 1946, its head office was in Dar es Salaam and its branches were in Mombasa and Kampala. Kenya’s capital did not feature at all.
“Don’t ask me why Nairobi was forgotten, but that is our genesis,” says Alkarim Jiwa, finance and strategy director of DTB.
The idea behind it was modest. Small savers brought their money in and the institution lent it back out so that families could buy their first homes and traders could start small businesses. Eight decades on, some of the people who keep that promise going were born into it.
“We’ve had cases across the country where we have existing employees whose parents or grandparents used to work at DTB, or whose uncles used to work here. It starts with the employees in our view,” Alkarim says.
Some of those careers began at the very bottom. Alkarim speaks of colleagues who arrived as messengers and cleaners and now run some of the bank’s most prominent branches.
“These are the true life stories. They’re not intended to be curated in any way, but they’ve happened, and I think that’s what the organisation is about, developing people,” he says.
The SME ethos
Alkarim was handed the finance function 25 years ago, young enough that he suspects he may have been the youngest CFO of any company then listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange.
“A lot of it is to do with the organisation having given me the opportunity of trusting this much younger lad than I am now to hold the reins of a CFO position at DTB,” he says.
As DTB approaches its 80th anniversary, Alkarim describes a deliberate move back towards the ordinary savers and small businesses it was built to serve, a journey he likens to coming full circle.
“As we’ve grown, our customers have grown, and as they’ve grown, increasingly we do serve another important segment, which is corporates, mainly local corporates, large organisations. But the ethos has always been towards serving SMEs,” he says.
The bank’s history also explains why sustainability sits beside customer reach and digital transformation at the heart of the bank’s strategy. DTB’s affiliation with the Aga Khan Development Network puts social and economic development in its mandate, and Alkarim is aware of how that can sound from the finance chief of a listed company.
“Hearing these words from the CFO of a commercial enterprise listed on the stock exchange may make you a bit sceptical, but the reality is that is our mandate. Yes, we have to deliver a return. We have to work for a return for our shareholders. But the return is, in a literal sense, double bottom line,” he says.
A very human feeling
The phrase describes two sets of results the bank is expected to deliver side by side, one measured by investors and the other by the lives it impacts over generations.
“It is not just about the traditional metrics that we CFOs are used to talking about like ROE and ROA. As we deliver that first bottom line, how do we also fulfil our purpose of delivering the second one about enriching and positively impacting the lives of all our stakeholders,” he says.
An institution that has lasted eight decades invites an obvious question about how it stays nimble. Alkarim’s answer is that the qualities everyone now prizes rest on something far older.
“Being agile, being adaptable, being quick off the mark, being tech enabled and tech ready, and forward looking and futuristic. These are all elements that are anchored on one key foundation, which is resilience,” he says.
He traces that resilience to the strength of the DTB brand and to client relationships that have outlasted the people who first opened the accounts. But there is one ingredient in banking he believes no machine can supply.
“You can’t replace trust, which is a very human feeling, by pushing AI alone. AI agility enables us to move forward quickly, to respond quickly, but it’s not necessarily a replacement of some key human values,” he says.
The CFO’s agenda
Alkarim has spent 37 years in the profession and 28 at DTB. The job he does today looks almost nothing like the one he stepped into.
“We are no longer just a controller. We are not just the bean counter. We are not just the custodian of the budget. Driving impact, fulfilling purpose and creating value are at the frontline of a CFO’s agenda,” he says.
Sustainability is among the areas that report to him, and it has pulled his attention well beyond the ledger.
“These days I tend to spend more time on non-finance areas than on finance areas, and I spend a lot of time within those non-finance areas on matters to do with sustainability,” he says.
After nearly four decades in finance, what keeps Alkarim going is his temperament.
“I’m very curious by nature. So I want to know how things work. I don’t mean it from an engineering perspective. I’m hopeless at those things,” he says.
Curious by nature
These days, his curiosity turns towards human behaviour and the way people respond to social problems. Asked what he still wants to become, he declines to name a destination.
“My personal national anthem is enjoy the journey, have fun whilst on the journey, and don’t worry too much about the destination,” he says.
When his two daughters left home to study abroad, Alkarim and his wife became empty nesters early, and he paid for eight lessons at a driving range to fill the gap.
“Five years down the road, I’ve completed only four out of those eight lessons. So I want to contact my trainer and remind him I have four more to go,” he says.
Help may be on its way. A young man in his daughter’s life, already a PGA-certified coach, has promised to take him out on the golf course on his next visit to Kenya.
“I’ll either be intimidated by him and his play, or maybe I don’t know if it will rekindle my interest in the game. I think he’s more hopeful than I am,” he says.
