Ivan Mbowa
Ivan Mbowa is the General Manager at Tala East-Africa and In this role Ivan oversees the end-to-end business health, problem-solving business and organizational issues, and leads the Country Squads & Country Leadership Teams to develop the strategy and drive execution.
Ivan built his career over the past 15 years focused on access to finance in Africa from international banking to venture capital-backed fin-tech entrepreneurship. Within this time, he has worked with institutions such as Citibank across 8 different markets in Africa, where he rose to Assistant Vice President within the first 6 years of his career.
Prior to his current role, Ivan co-founded and launched Umati Capital (a Kenya-based fin-tech startup) focused on providing working capital to SMEs within the agribusiness sector. He grew the startup from concept to scale (US$8 million in loans disbursed) and played key roles including strategy formulation, product development, hiring and managing a team of up to 21 fin-tech professionals.
Umati Capital has been recognized as a top fin-tech startup in the region by international media (Al Jazeera and BBC Africa) and has won numerous international accolades such as the 2015 Citi Mobile Challenge – EMEA Most Innovative Solution for Business & the 2015 MIT/Mastercard Foundation Zambezi Prize for Financial Inclusion.
He graduated from Tufts University, USA with a BA (Economics) and BA (International Relations).
